Barnet Bound

Goodbye, Hello

2007-10-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone is really still reading this. But if you are, I invite you to join me over at my new blog.

Mabelicious Mayhem

2007-08-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, the wheels are in motion. My valiant web administrator--my father--is making it so I can host a blog on my own domain name. I still need a title, though, people. I've received many good suggestions, some of which are going to be used for other things, but I still haven't found the perfect name for my own personal blog. So keep them coming.

By way of update, here are some bullet points of what I have been up to since last I posted:

My partner and I found a beautiful apartment, on the ground floor of a bright pink Victorian duplex in West Philly. Our stuff is sitting in the living room while the landlord finishes fixing up the bathroom. We move in Saturday.
A lovely family reunion was had down in North Carolina, outside of Asheville.
We planned our wedding. We've been meaning to get married off and on for like the last seven years, and slightly more seriously the last year or so, but finally found a nice little Episcopal church in DC that is both queer-friendly and would marry an unbaptized heathen like me. So that's on now.
A brief but very pleasant trip up to the ancestral encampment in the Adirondacks. I really wish I could blog more about what it is like up there, but, as they say, that wouldn't do. Suffice to say, I socialized with the new president of the New York Stock Exchange (very pleasant man), and then also with one of the main funders behind the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth (deceptively pleasant as well).
My partner's grandmother passed away early Monday morning, suddenly but peacefully. She was a lovely woman. People always describe elderly women who have a bare pulse as "feisty," but she really was feisty in the best sense of the word. Her death was not unexpected, but of course that does not make it any less sad.
But most happily, Mary and I have a new family member. Her name is Mabel, and those are her ears flapping in the Adirondack breeze at the top. She's about one and a half years old, and the only identifiable breed the DNA testing at the shelter found was Daschund. Mind you, she's sixty pounds, and looks to be mainly a mixture of Doberman and a Black and Tan Coonhound. With the small, but unfortunate, exception of trying to eat my grandmother's dog for lunch once, she is incredibly sweet and affectionate. I would show you her face, but I shall leave it as a teaser--once I have my new blog all set up and going, you'll have to go there to see her adorable front!

The Great Blog Naming Competition

2007-08-09T08:05:00.001-07:00

When your parents start inquiring if you are alive, that is when it is time to update your blog. Mary and I are safely in Philadelphia. My sister is out of town, so we are staying in her apartment while we search for our own. Everything we own between the two of us is in a sixteen foot Penske truck, parked in the suburban driveway of friends. We have the truck until Friday, on the off chance that we will find a place into which we can move immediately; otherwise, it'll go into storage.

We've been moving for almost exactly a month now, first out of London, and then out of Los Angeles. This makes me cranky, because I am a bit of a slug, and enjoy having time to zone out in front of a television or the internets. Such time has not been forthcoming.

But more importantly, I am very out of touch with both my own blog and the blog world more generally. There has been an interesting dialogue over at Dial M for Musicology about the intersection of blogging and academic careers, sparked by a post by Drew over at amusicology. Bloggers of course worry about this stuff all the time, and I guess now that there is the small spark of a musicology blogging community, it is time for us to go through our ritual career worries.

I certainly have them myself. I started this blog two years ago, when I was spending the summer in England and wanted to let my friends and family know what I was up to. I originally signed my posts with my real name, but then adopted a very mild anonymity. Anyone who reads this and knows me in real life will instantly know it is me, and anyone who doesn't know me could figure out my name in about five seconds of googling. The one barrier I hoped to maintain was the Google barrier: I hoped that when someone googled my real name, this blog would not appear. I think that is mostly still true.

But I've decided it's time to start a new blog, and shut down good ol' Barnet Bound. There are two reasons. One is that I am no longer bound to Barnet. Mary graduated from vet school, and we are now living together in the US. There is no longer anything intercontinental about us.

But more importantly, I am going on the academic job market for the first time this fall. (Which reminds me: if you love the blog, you'll love the junior faculty member!) And not only has this blog been a little too personal for my own taste--it's probably not a great idea to advertise one's anxieties about teaching and dissertating when searching for a job--I also envy the more public forum for writing some others have. In other words, I'd like to attach my own name to my own writing. So, down with Barnet Bound, up with a new blog under my real name.

Which brings me to the Great Blog Naming Competition. I liked the alliteration and obtuseness of Barnet Bound, but that title was arrived at more or less accidentally. Now that I have a chance to choose a new title for my blog...what should it be? Anyone would provides the winning title will be treated to a free drink at the next musicological conference or family reunion, as the case may be.

Wandering

2007-08-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

When last we spoke, I was in London, cheerfully finishing Harry Potter. Since that time, I have moved Mary out of her London apartment, flown back to Los Angeles, gone to Disneyland, packed up my apartment (with the help of a dozen beautiful, beautiful friends), loaded all of my belongings on a truck, attached my little car to a dolly behind said truck, and driven to Flagstaff, Arizona. This is not our final destination; it was simply as far as we could make it yesterday, which wasn't very. Exhaustion does not begin to describe our state of being.

We aim to arrive in Philadelphia by Monday, whereupon we will camp out in my sister's apartment, and try to find one for ourselves. Then a week after that, it is off to a family reunion down in North Carolina.

My dissertation misses me. I miss it.

Writing Through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

For for the first time. A mesostic of sounds from the chapter "Battle of Hogwarts," with apologies to John Cage.


                  too huge
                  screaming with blood
                blundering
  high, cold, and clear
                      yells and shouts

                thin, piteous human
         silence swallowed
                distant      
      surprisingly soft
                   screams
                smattering of applause

----
Interestingly, Rowland uses very few sounds in her writing. This makes it much more difficult to go through, as Cage did with Finnegan's Wake, and draw out sound-words and phonemes. The above mesostic was drawn from only 26 or so such sound descriptions I found in the chapter. Considering that most of the chapter is describing a battle, and Harry's escape from a gigantic fire-monster-thing, you would think there would be more sounds.

Incidentally, the book? Loved it. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Sopranos ending, but I equally loved Rowland's approach to ending a complicated, character-driven epic.

All Things Bright and British

2007-07-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

Mary's graduation went swimmingly on Wednesday. It was not, unfortunately, in the London Guild Hall where it usually is, but rather in a somewhat dreary University of London student center. But there were lots of fun academic robes and maces, and everything was presided over by the Most Honorable 7th Marquess of Salisbury. Who, it later turned out, is a fairly annoying right-wing Tory in the House of Lords, but still, he's a Marquess, and we don't have those in the land of the free.

After the ceremony Mary's mother took us out for sushi, and then for dinner we drove with her father up to Essex for dinner and Morris dancing in a pub. We were met there by a crusty old English veterinarian Mary used to work for, and who was, I suspect, James Herriot incarnate.

And then, if things weren't English enough, there was a black tie graduation ball at Hatfield House. I was sort of expecting Hatfield House to be the local community center, but it turned out to be the home of aforementioned Marquess of Salisbury. And his home is a Tudor/Jacobean mansion, owned most notably by Henry the VIII. Queens Elizabeth and Mary grew up there, and supposedly Elizabeth was sitting underneath an oak tree in the courtyard when she found out that Mary had died, and she was now queen. The dinner and dancing were in the oldest part of the grounds, the original 15th century Great Hall. It felt a little odd to be doing the Macarena underneath the antlers of a deer shot by Henry VIII, but we Americans, we adapt.

Satiation

2007-07-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Mary's father, I tonight ate the following:

1. Wild Mushroom and Bergamot Soup

2. Roast Saddle of Wiltshire Rabbit with Foie Gras and Summer Truffle Risotto ("Game may contain lead shot.")

3. Chocolate Pudding with Spearmint and Pistachio Ice Cream

This all at Rules, supposedly the oldest private restaurant in London.

Barnet Bound

2007-07-10T10:58:00.000-07:00

Very occasionally, the title of this blog makes sense. In a few hours I am off to the airport. Eleven very cramped hours after that, I'll be in Barnet for two weeks. Incidentally, I missed the exact date, but this summer marks the two year anniversary of this humble blog. I began it initially when I was in England for the summer of 2005, so that I didn't have to write the same repetitive little travelogue email to all of my friends and family.

Apologies to the many, many people I owe things to at the moment. They are coming.

Will somebody please come kill my cats so that they will stop playing in my suitcase? Thanks.

Four Pondering Questions

2007-07-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

Mary thanks everyone for their kind comments. It has been a whirlwind for her! I leave Tuesday for her graduation.

I have been whirling around myself. I decided that the best way to get all of my tasks done before leaving town would be to go for a preemptive two-day vacation to San Francisco. Friday morning I took a Southwest shuttle up, Saturday I drove down. There were two occasions for this. The sad one is that a friend of mine's mother just died up there, and I was able to meet him for breakfast and a walk in a park. The happy reason was that my little sister, who is an opera singer, was performing in the city. My parents were driving down from Oregon, and since I don't see them or my sister enough, it seemed like a good time to go up. The concert was great, needless to say. And it made me horribly, horribly homesick for the Bay Area. I grew up in the east bay, but am rarely able to visit. Especially now that my parents have moved away, I have few ties, and this makes me sad. I love Los Angeles, and many other places, but there is no other place in which I feel happier than the Bay Area. Especially since I was introduced to the La Farine morning bun, which had somehow eluded my childhood.

Anyways, a friend and I drove down yesterday, which was surprisingly pleasant--Interstate 5 is a miserable drive, but good conversation made it fly by. And although I am exhausted by the traveling, I am nevertheless motivated to answer Tenured Radical's tag for the "Eight Things I wonder about" meme, started over here. I'm not a big meme person, but the whiny formlessness of this one appeals to me in my current state of mind. Except I'm tired, so my version is going to be four things I am pondering.

Four Things I Am Pondering

1. When I was at the beach for the Fourth of July, celebrating our victorious march on terrorism at home and abroad, I noticed an increase in the number of tummy tattoos. Men with big gothic script letters arching across, or women with little chains of thorns or whatever around their bellybutton. My question: are they (a) supremely overconfident in their ability to stay in shape the rest of their lives, or (b) stupid?

2. Will I survive this summer? Seriously. It's not looking good.

3. Los Angeles: there are not many people who love this city. But there are some. I think I am one. But some of those who love this city defend it in terms that suggest that those who do not like Los Angeles are lacking in critical faculty. As in, if you don't like Los Angeles, it is because of romantic attachment to old-fashioned ideals. Los Angeles complicates binaries, the reasoning goes, and forces you to confront prejudices you didn't know you had. For instance, one might argue, Los Angeles is actually not about superficiality. In fact, quite the opposite. In east coast cities, you know you are in a fancy neighborhood if there are brick sidewalks and nice old houses. In Los Angeles, outward appearances will give you no guide to what is inside. This fancy restaurant down the street from me looks like a double-wide trailer home. Isn't that how things should be? Hmmm.

4. Why is it so impossible for me to get work done at home? These days, I only work at coffeeshops. Objectively, this is odd, as at home I have a very comfortable chair, a desk, plentiful food and beverage, and internet. At coffeeshops, I have a rickety table, expensive food, sometimes no internet, and lots of distraction. Will this all change someday, when I am living in a situation that allows my bed and desk to be in different rooms? What about if I have a campus office, will I be able to work there? Would air conditioning help? Is solitude the problem, do I need to have bustle around me? Is it the fueling fire of a professionally-made cappuccino?

Since I am only pondering four things, I am only going to tag four others: Sushi Pajamas, Miscellaneous Mayhem, Violet Vixen, Jewel Dakini? Have at it! Ponder away!

Lock up your horses

2007-07-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

Many little girls want to be veterinarians. Some boys too, but many, many little girls. Some of those girls go on to college. A few of them stay on the pre-vet track, even while rowing varsity for crew all four years. Fewer do well enough that they get into veterinary school. Fewer still make it through four years of vet school. Even fewer go to a vet school in Europe that requires an extra year of training, and which despite being eight time zones away from her boyfriend is one of the best places in the world to study furry things.

But last week my partner took her very final exams, having already passed the American boards. A week's worth of testing, plus scores averaged in from previous practical exams, a research paper, rotation evaluations, and so on.

And this morning, she found out she passed! I can now present to you, at the tender age of 26, Dr. Mary, DVM MRCVS.

You can't tell, but this is the picture of the official parking spot for the veterinarian at the Royal Mews.

Swimming Safely

2007-07-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

Like lots of Los Angeles apartment buildings, mine has a pool. Unlike many pools in LA, ours is not doing so well. It always looks a little cloudy, but this summer the residents of my building have been cheerfully gamboling about in it. This is unusual; back when my building was largely senior citizens, nobody ever went in. But in the last year, more and more young people have moved in, and for a few weeks this summer the pool was becoming quite a party spot. Many of the new residents are twenty-something power lesbians, and they all seem to like the pool. They'd frolic around drinking cheap beer all night long.

But then, like the careers of elected officials in my fair city, things went downhill. The water started to get cloudier and cloudier. It started to turn a peculiar green. There seemed to be an interesting amount of hair floating about, and then a few cigarette butts. As if to confirm the obvious, an official-looking sign suddenly went up: "Pool Closed by Order of the Department of Health and Safety." And now it is supposed to hit triple-digit temperatures, and we have no pool.

In other news, I want to recommend two great blog posts:

Tenured Radical, with whom my partner used to row but from whom I stupidly never took any classes, has a great post about the Sherley tenure case at MIT. That post, and a related one from February, make beautiful arguments about the reality of evaulative processes in academia for people of color, women, and queers. Especially people of color. She says all the things I wish I could think to say when people grouse about how hard it is for white people to get academic jobs. And I say that as a white guy who is scared stiff about getting a job next year.
The indomitable Susie Bright is always wonderful. She had a great post awhile back about the annoying tag "NSFW", or, "Not Safe for Work." Today she has a neat post about safety in general. The notion of "safety" is so fascinating. It was something that came up for me in college a lot; if this blog weren't mildly anonymous, I would link to an editorial I once wrote that made very similar points.

Rodents I Have Loved

2007-07-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

Three words for you:

Ratatouille is awesome.

Admittedly, I love rodents. I had two rats as a kid. I can't remember the first one's name, as I was in second grade or so. As I recall, he was a classroom pet who needed a home for Christmas, and ended up living with me permanently. My second rat, much loved, was named Bubba. I think he might have also been an adopted classroom rat. Bubba was wonderful, and lived a very long happy life. When he developed a tumor, we took to the vet to be put to sleep, and I bawled my little eyes out even though I was really too old for that sort of thing. I put him in a box to take to the vet, and gave him a slice of chocolate cake since I figured it didn't matter anymore. The vet very kindly took him to a back room to the deed, and wow, was I ever sad.

We also had many mice in our house--mine was named Perot, on account of his large ears. Unfortunately, one morning I awoke to find that one of his ears was missing. Not sure where it went. The vet presumed that he just scratched or gnawed it off or something. Not much to be done except daub neosporin on the stump daily, he said, which I did faithfully. He also lived a long and happy life, despite being occasionally tormented by the cat, who would sit on top of his cage staring down at the poor little guy, and would occasionally manage to fish him out and bat him around. Never did serious harm, so we figured it was all in good fun. Keeps the reflexes sharp.

We also had a rabbit, but he was rather mean. He was a hand-me-down from a neighbor who moved away, who had themselves inherited him from another neighbor. We tried hard to love Friskie, but he repaid our love with rabbit squeals and biting. I tell you though, he lived a very long time for a rabbit. He even made it through an evacuation--when the Oakland Hills Fire came close to us in 1991, we had to bundle all the pets in the car to flee. (Except the goldfish. My mother convinced me they would be fine in their water.) The dog roamed free in the minivan, the cat had his carrier, and the mouse was oblivious to the world in his little box, but the poor rabbit had to be stuffed into whatever we had available, which ended up being Bubba's old rat cage. He fit, but he was not a happy rabbit.

Incidentally, is Mitt Romney not supremely creepy? Who straps their dog on top of a car?

Anyways, the movie Ratatouille is wonderful. I can vouch that the animators really did a wonderful job in capturing the rodent spirit. They got their cute little hands just right, and the sound guys did an excellent job of recreating the sound of scampering rat. It made me want to have another pet rat.

Not to mention the food. Man. I've never been so hungry from watching an animated movie about rats.

LAs I will miss

2007-07-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

It's still hot, and I know it will be like this all summer long. Going outside becomes an ordeal, just like winter in a snow climate--you've got to slather on sunblock an all exposed surfaces. You've got to put your contacts in so you can wear sunglasses. You've got to make sure you're taking your own car, which has air conditioning, and not the friend's car that has vinyl seats and no AC. Movie theaters are good. The beach is good. Apartments are bad.

But I'm not going to complain about the heat anymore. Today is July 1, so I have exactly one more month in Los Angeles. After reading the horror stories about UHaul, I have reserved a Penske truck for August 1 to schlep my stuff to an as-of-yet-undetermined location on the other side of the country. And I'm going to miss this godforsaken city! So, I want to blog about things I will miss about LA. Consider this a first installment.

Largo is a small club in my neighborhood. It's mostly sit-down tables, with a small bar area, and a small stage with an excellent sound system. The owner is this annoying Irish guy who just had a baby. The bartender is a lovely woman who is a photographer in her real life. Generations of musicologists have trekked to Largo to hear music. I have spent hours and hours sitting at the bar with friends, sipping my Harp and enjoying the strict no-cellphone-policy quiet. The deal with Largo is that you can reserve a table for dinner, but it sells out way in advance usually. But if you get there early, you can wait in line outside, and the first dozen people or so get seats at the bar. So if it is a popular performer, like Jon Brion's regular Friday night residency, you get there at like 7 pm, and hunker down on the sidewalk for several hours, then spend another hour or so drinking at the bar while people eat there dinner. Finally, Jon or whoever will come on at like 10 pm, and play until midnight.

The hours of waiting get old after awhile, and the quality of the music can be uneven. It's actually been almost a year and a half since I've last been. But last Thursday I went with friends to see the alternative bluegrass group Nickelcreek. They are a pair of siblings, the Watkins family, about my age I guess, who are always playing at Largo. I gather they are actually kind of big now, but I always think of them as the slightly dorky but adorable kids who get dragged up on stage by Jon Brion all the time.

But anyways, this show was just lovely, and reminds me how much I love Largo sometimes. Beautiful tunes, impeccably played. People wandered on stage constantly to play a song or two. One of those people was Fiona Apple, who seems to live permanently at Largo--Mary has run into her in the women's restroom more than once. She looked, as she always does, both beautiful and traumatized, and sang through a handful of lovely bluegrass and original tunes with the group. Then it was the opening act's birthday, so cupcakes were passed around and everyone sang.

I apologize

2007-06-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

But it's too damn hot to blog.

Here is how my life may be summarized:

1. Mary finished her final exams for vet school. She finds out next week if she passed or not.
2. I have a lot to get done before I leave for her graduation. And not enough time to do it in. Perhaps seeing lots of movies and drinking too much will help me accomplish my goals.

Saturday Night with a Robot

2007-06-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Against the responsible advice of my mother, girlfriend, and several in the blogosphere, I bought Delicious Library and have been having a cheerful time scanning in my books. It goes very quickly, I promise I couldn't have written a dissertation chapter in the time it will take to do them all! In the last forty minutes I just scanned three shelves, or 129 books. I estimate I have about 1100 more to go. It's kind of fun to go through all of my books one by one, remembering all the courses I bought textbooks for and the fun used bookstores in which I found gems.

The best part is that when the software recognizes your book, a robotic women's voice reads the title. That's fine when it's something like "Leo Tolstoy, war-and-peace," but my queer theory books almost killed her: "Judith Butler, excitable-Speech-a-politics-of-the-performative...Judith Butler, gender-trouble-feminism-and-the-subersion-of-identity...Judith Butler, bodies-that-matter-on-the-discursive-limits-of-sex."

Then, however, I got to my philosophy shelf. Plato, fine, Derrida, fine, Berkeley, fine. But Descartes?

"Rene Descartes, Meditations-on-First-Philosophy-In-Which-the-Existence-of-God-and-the-Distinction-of-the-Soul-from-the-Body-Are-Demonstrated."

It's a wild Saturday night here in Los Angeles.

Public Lives

2007-06-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

I am very fond of my undergraduate institution, Wesleyan University. It's a great school, with an amazing intellectual culture that produces more than its fair share of interesting academics, activists, and artists. The incoming president, Michael Roth, is a fairly young alumnus who is an academic himself, the former president of an art school, and seems like a cool guy. (Unlike the previous president, who was an anti-intellectual jerk who made no secret of his general dislike for the student body.) I'm excited about the school's future, and will be a happy (small) donor some day when I have more money.

However, I just noticed something. We got this press release that Robert and Elena Allbritton, young but apparently wealthy alumni, gave $5 million to the school to create a "Center for the Study of Public Life."

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life is a response to significant changes across the social sciences, which include the creation of new interdisciplinary ventures, the use of multiple methodologies in research, and the rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements. The Allbritton Center will build on evolving relationships between scholarly research and both the political process and the greater public. It will host courses taught by people who have had distinguished careers in public service, including law, business, government, the non-profit sector, and media. It also will house a Quantitative Analysis Center to educate students in the analysis and interpretation of large bodies of data

Sounded laudable enough to me. The press release goes on to point out that Robert Allbritton founded Politico, a political web site with a Republican slant I find generally annoying, but whatever, it's all good. We left wing types are open-minded about who we associate with.

But do you know what else Robert Allbritton has done in his short career? Well, he was President and CEO of Riggs Bank, a local financial institution in Washington, DC, owned by the Allbritton family. And why does the Allbritton name sound vaguely familiar? Well, in March he resigned as president in disgrace. Why? Let's ask the Washington Post!

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has closely monitored Riggs since early last year and must approve any senior executive appointments, was informed of Allbritton's replacements, the company said. Riggs was fined a record $25 million by the OCC last spring for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws, and in January the bank pleaded guilty and paid a $16 million fine for failing to prevent possible money laundering by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and officials of the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea.

That's right. It's turn out that the Allbritton family is widely believed to have personally assisted Certified Evil Dictator Augusto Pinochet in hiding his assets from the various courts that are trying to seize them. Want more? Read another Post article. Robert's father Joe seems to have been the major culprit--although some random low-level employees took the legal fall--but it's hard to believe my illustrious brother in Wesleyan alumdom was not part of some very bad things.

And this guy wants to start a "Center for the Study of Public Life"? Well, I suppose it is true that Pinochet did pioneer a certain "rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements," in that, you know, he had most of his public secretly executed.

I guess whatever, Wesleyan can use the Allbritton money. But I respectfully suggest that it might make a fitting tribute to the institutions of democracy if it were renamed the Salvador Allende Memorial Center for the Study of Public Life. After all, 2008 marks the centennial of Allende's birth, and if Robert Allbritton is really looking for a way to assuage some guilt with his gift, he might as well go all the way.

How To Be a Grad Student

2007-06-22T23:10:00.000-07:00

Summer "vacation" is seemingly awfully busy. Yuck. But I wanted to leave everyone with a quick link to a compendium of blog posts about graduate student life put together by Horace over at To Delight and Instruct. Check it out!

Okay, fine.

2007-06-19T10:47:00.001-07:00

I might be an Obama supporter, I might dislike the Clinton family individually and as a unit, but...I have to admit, the new Hillary campaign video is brilliant.

That said, her official campaign song is a sappy French-Canadian ballad? Clearly somebody did not, as all campaigns should, hire an in-house musicologist.

How To Do Things With Teaching

2007-06-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

My favorite teacher as an undergraduate was a professor who had been denied tenure at the beginning of his career. There were a lot of reasons for it--institutional homophobia for one--but he was also very upfront with that he hadn't published very much early on. He hadn't, he once told me, because it took him almost ten years of teaching before he learned "how to teach." It worked out fine for him; he had been denied tenure in the history department, and unusually, the more liberal English department offered him a position. Twenty-five years later, he's a world-famous scholar and one of the most popular teachers at the university.

I've always been struck by his comment though, especially as I've become an academic myself and experienced what he was talking about. I finished grading the final papers for the class I have been a teaching assistant for. There's some paperwork left to, but basically, this was hopefully my last day ever as a TA. I'm not going to miss it. Once you've had the taste of leading your own class, with your own syllabus, your own standards, your own personality, it's hard to go back to the status of minion. I have enjoyed TAing this year more than most; I've had the same thirty students, all majors finishing up the history sequence, all year now, and it has been wonderful to actually get to know some undergraduates in the bureaucratic morass that is my university. I get to lead my own discussion section once a week, and do occasional guest lectures, and that has been very fulfilling.

But best of all, I do feel like this year I finally figured out how to teach. I've always felt like a bit of a fraud as a teacher. Not in terms of subject matter, but in terms of pedagogical authority in the classroom. I have often felt that I rely too much upon my own subject position: essentially, I am a tall white guy, and therefore my students automatically listen to me more than they do to others. I've seen the proof of this year after year. My very first experience teaching in a college-level situation was when I was a TA as an undergraduate, for a bunch of frosh taking a Mozart course. My co-TA and I lead Friday listening sessions; she was a short white woman, and I was, well, me. 6'2" and WASPy as all hell. And I most definitely do not have an aggressive personality, or even a very loud voice, and as a junior in college I sure didn't know what I was talking about. Nevertheless, the students were visibly more respectful of me than my counterpart.

So as I was saying, I feel like my first couple years teaching as a graduate student, I kind of coasted on my subject position. I didn't have to worry about what I wore, I didn't have to be concerned that I would be viewed as "bitchy" if I asserted myself. I could talk about race without the white kids tuning out. I did have to work on learning how to project my voice better. (Aside: at one of the first academic papers I ever gave, a very famous scholar who chaired my panel took me aside and told me, nicely, that I would never make it in academia if I didn't learn to speak louder. That was some very effective advice!) But that's no big deal. Yes, I occupy a slightly minoritarian subject position when it comes to sexual orientation, but honestly, that can carry its own sort of privilege in academia, especially if your everyday performance reads, as I think mine does, as mostly straight.

This is all to say that because I try to be fairly self-reflexive, it was hard for me to take much pleasure in my teaching abilities. But I do think I made some progress this year in figuring out how to use the reality of my own self for more effective teaching:

Rather than fight it, I have in some ways become more formal. When I taught my own class I almost always wore a jacket. (This might seem obvious to readers from elsewhere, but in Southern California seeing professors at all dressed up is very uncommon.) When I am actually gainfully employed as a professor, I can really see myself being the sort who wears a tie every day. I also rather enjoy lecturing my students in a rather haranguing fashion. Oddly, they seem to enjoy it too. Part of it is no doubt because my formality is paired with the fact that I am a big softie when it comes to grades and late papers, but I think it is more than that. Although I really appreciate pedagogical approaches that try to break down authority in the classroom, I don't think progressive teaching has to necessarily go that route. As any member in good standing of the queer community knows, authoritarianism doesn't have to be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with a little dominance and submission, as long as everyone knows the safe word.
Which also means treating students with a degree of formality and respect. My favorite undergrad professor who I talked about above, ran a very tight ship. He didn't allow any questions at all while he was lecturing, but saved twenty minutes at the end of class for questions. Students addressed him as Professor X, but in return he addressed them as Mr. and Ms. Y.
I talked about myself a lot. This does two good things. One is that the students find it amusing. But it also introduces self-reflection. This is a good thing for college students. One of my typical sermons is about privilege. I have a lot of privilege, I tell them, and I list everything about me that makes me privileged. But the upshot is, everyone who is in a college classroom also has privilege. Privilege is not an on/off situation, it's a continuum. Everyone has at least some, and you've got to know how to deal with it.
More than anything, I've tried so hard to listen to my students. I always hate it when students, or even audience members at a conference or participants in a seminar, ask a speaker a question, and the speaker is so wrapped up in his or her own thoughts they don't actually listen to what the questioners are saying. Listening to what someone is saying isn't always easy, and it means thinking on your feet and often spouting stupid things in response, but I think listening is the single most important tool for getting students to stay engaged.

Obviously much of this won't work for everyone. And I hope I can keep self-reflective about my own teaching, just like everyone should. But I think I am finally at a point where I've learned how to teach. Watch out, world!

The Time This Blog Saved My Career

2007-06-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

The listserv of the American Musicological Society is currently embroiled in an extremely frustrating discussion of the "disco sucks" movement. Obviously this listserv is not the place one goes for intellectual stimulation--a usual discussion thread will be something like, "Hey, let's list every piece of music we can think of that is about trains!"--but you know, I wish it didn't want to make me tear my eyeballs out. I can deal with boredom, but this...

Anyways, my friends and I joke that one's cultural capital in musicology is inversely proportional to the number of emails one sends to the AMS-l. But because I need to vent steam, this is what I would email in were I more careless. It is apropos of several emails from various scholars assuming that we all agree disco music is shallow and dishonest. My response is the boiler plate response anyone who has remotely studied popular music would give.

I myself was not born until after the famous Disco Demolition night in Chicago, so disco is purely a historical phenomenon for me, as it is for the undergraduates I teach--their knowledge, and mine before graduate school, largely comes from doing the "YMCA" at middle school dances.

So given that most of us historians of a sort, it seems important to emphasize that it might not be so productive to reproduce a historical debate as if we are now unaware of its ramifications. If the music was shallow, then the implicit argument is that those who found meaning in it were themselves shallow. Rejecting an entire genre of music wholesale is also to be rejecting those people who listened to it. Perhaps not everyone in the 1970s was aware of disco's original fan base in urban communities of gay black men, but presumably everyone on this list is now aware of this.

See, blogs make everything seem much more civilized. If I sent this to the list, people would think I am accusing them of homophobia (and they would be right), flames would ensue, my enemies would end up on a search committee someday, bad bad bad. Here, I can post this, maybe a few people will respond, and it's all good.

Incidentally, many congratulations to my two friends who received their doctoral hoods today! May we all live to see such a day for ourselves.

Total Book Organization

2007-06-13T21:04:00.000-07:00

So, my fellow academics and other people who regularly move large quantities of books: do we think that it would a valuable use of my time to catalog all my books with a program like this, and then further keep track of which book goes into which box when I move this summer?

Pluses: keeping the right books with me is the bane of my existence. I'm not a good note-taker, I tend to either remember something or have to look it up on the spot. So, when I'm immersed in writing, I like to have the appropriate books with me. If I'm going to get writing done during this hectic summer*, total book organization will be necessary.

Also, I like gadgets. Being able to use a web cam as a bar code scanner? Awesome.

Minuses: I could probably write a dissertation chapter in the time it would take me to catalog my books, thus freeing me from the need to write this summer. Plus, I would be embarrassed to tell people how nerdy I am.

In other news, many thanks to the illustrious Professor Ford at Dial M for thinking I'm a thinking blogger. Cheers! If it's a four-way tie, though, do I get to nominate five thinking bloggers myself, or just one and a quarter?

Speaking of musicology blogs, I have to warn you: rumor is, there might be yet another musicology group blog starting up by this fall. Can the blogosphere handle three such unnatural beasts?

Incidentally, for all of you bloggers lounging around sipping your coffee and contemplating a day of writing and snood, I just today gave a final exam. I will not miss the quarter system.

*This summer I am spending a chunk of July watching the ol' ball in chain graduate in England, and then coming back to LA to pack up my apartment to move before August 1. The best part is, I don't know where I'm moving to yet. Haha, fun!

Weird and Distasteful Things in a Forest

2007-06-11T15:57:00.000-07:00

'Tis the season of dilated pupils in West Hollywood.

The gig went well enough yesterday. It was fun to play on an actual stage, with real sound system and a living, breathing sound man fiddling with knobs. The crowd was enthusiastic, and if the nearby karaoke tent drowned out the last chord of "Father Figure," well, that's all in the spirit of things.

As for LA Pride overall, I hate myself when I say things like this, but...it doesn't quite compare to SF Pride. It's not that one is more or less commercial than the other, or that there is any real substantial difference between the rainbow tchotchke stands and Budweiser booths in LA or SF. The biggest difference is raw numbers: LA Pride gets about 300,000 people. In San Francisco, attendance has topped out above one million people. That means that population of SF actually more than doubles for one day. You really feel the numbers in every aspect of the parade and festival. A few dozen dozen dykes on bikes roaring down Santa Monica Blvd? Amusing. Hundreds of dykes on bikes hurtling down Market Street? Awe-inspiring.

Still, pride parades are what they are, and are usually fun. I've been to prides in NYC (very hot and crowded), Hartford (low-key and cute), DC (low-key and boring) and of course San Francisco. When I was in high school, in about 1997 or so, I was actually a safety monitor for SF Pride, meaning that I got a t-shirt and my own 20 feet of the parade route to keep safe. My main memory is that I was wearing incredibly dorky shorts with my orange safety shirt. But I think my twenty feet's worth of crowd enjoyed having a 17-year old teenage boy looking after them. My parents and sister marched with PFLAG that year, and when they came to my section and broke away to give me a hug, the crowd went wild.

Speaking of men doing things, those of you who know me or my family will find this article extraordinarily amusing.

The Smell of Paparazzi in the Morning

2007-06-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

Both yesterday and today, I was woken up at 7:00 am by the sound of helicopters. Not helicopter singular; any Los Angeleno worth his or her salt is used to the drone of a police helicopter prowling around the skies. This was the heavy thunderous sound of multiple helicopters, some sort of weird consumer culture version of Apocalypse Now.

Yesterday I didn't know what it was, but as I walked to the bus this morning, I looked up and saw that there five helicopters circling around my neighborhood. Or rather, not quite my block, but a few blocks up the hill from me, above Sunset Blvd. That's where West Hollywood's orderly rows of apartment buildings turn into the grotesque disorder of Disneyfied modernism that is the Hollywood Hills.

"What important celebrity event has happened in the past few days?" I asked myself. Ah yes, Paris Hilton's release from jail! Paris short-lived house arrest took place just a few blocks north of me, and apparently the world's paparazzi was staking out her new "jail" even from above.

Hearing about Paris's screaming and crying in the courtroom gives me a twinge of sympathy, but I think I have to stay pretty resolutely in favor of jail for her. A friend of mine once got a DUI, had a second offense, and had to spend 30 days in jail. It wasn't fun, I'm sure he was having daily nervous breakdowns and not sleeping, and I'm sure I would too, but you know...he survived. And he wasn't in a special celebrity section of a woman's jail.

Photo: Paris at LA Pride in I think 2005, with Tinkerbell and her mother. She was, I believe, the celebrity grand marshal. She was surrounded by really intense police security that pushed everyone back rather roughly. More than a few boos from my section of the crowd.

Recommendations

2007-06-04T19:31:00.000-07:00

What should you do this weekend?

Well, if you are in Los Angeles, you know that this weekend is Pride. And on Sunday, there is the big festival after the parade. And at that festival, there is a small stage known as the "Empowerment Zone," where they sequester the people of color and trans performers. And on that stage, from 2:00-4:00 pm, will be a set organized by the good people at Transcend. And in that set, probably towards the end, a certain blogger, though neither trans nor a person of color himself, might be playing backup guitar in the best transgender black Elvis cover band you'll ever see.

Unfortunately, to pay for all the white and non-trans performers on the main stage, tickets to the festival cost $15 if you buy before Saturday, $20 at the door. I'm sure it goes to a good cause. Or maybe it goes to a secret fund to evict impoverished seniors from West Hollywood, I dunno.

On the other side of the country, if you are in Philadelphia (which, according to my sitemeter widget, some of you are!) this Friday, you should go hear my friend Joel do a reading (with some other writers) at the Chapterhouse Cafe. See his blog for more details. There will probably be less Elvis involved, but they can't help it, they're born that way.

And if you are in neither of those places, you're flat out of luck.

Update: According to my mother, that last statement is not strictly true, at least in Ashland, OR. There is some pretty rockin' Shakespeare happening in Ashland this weekend.

Advisement/Avertissement

2007-06-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

In lieu of an actual post, I direct you to Dr. Crazy's recent thoughtful post about the process of becoming an "academic" in the psychological sense. I always enjoy Crazy's writing on the ethics of advising undergraduates to continue on to graduate school, the essential question being, "given how unfulfilling and ultimately unsuccessful academia will be for the majority of those who choose this route, why do we encourage our students to go on to graduate school?" Entering graduate school because you want to be like your tenured advisor at a fancy pants school, who seems to spend all of his or her time thinking great thoughts and enjoying long summer vacations, is a recipe for disaster.

I have a number of students, graduating seniors, who plan to apply to doctoral programs in musicology next fall, so I've been thinking about this a lot. I think I know these particular students well enough to tell myself that they are indeed suited for academia, and will do well both intellectually and emotionally. But with any of my students who ask me about graduate school, I try hard to be both encouraging ("Yay, you like musicology and are really smart!") and realistic ("Just so you know, all of your TAs have been living below the poverty line for the last five years"). Not that I kid myself that the advice I hand out is that important. Honestly, I didn't listen too closely to my professors about such things when I was an undergraduate, and I know perfectly well that they probably aren't either.

For me, there is also another aspect of this ethical question too. I, for one, believe that musicology would be a much better discipline if its members came from more diverse backgrounds. Therefore, when I have a student who is a student of color, or the first in their family to attend college, or is even from some interesting musical subculture, there is a part of my brain that thinks, "I should encourage this person to enter academia, so that academia will be better." And then, the other part of my brain responds, "Okay, so academia will be better off for having this kid, but will this kid be better off for being an academic?" Obviously I can't really answer this second question for another person, but I think it is an important internal dialogue to have with yourself.

Hmm, so much for "in lieu of an actual post." Back to work, Barnet Bound!

Pop and R&B

2007-05-27T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tuesday Cat Blogging

2007-05-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

My gosh! I forgot a very important anniversary this week!

Exactly one year ago, Violet Vixen and I took home Pablo and Carlos, two sweet little kitties. Well, one sweet little kittie (Pablo) and one rambunctious-but-cute monster (Carlos). At one point this blog threatened to degenerate into the worst stereotype of self-indulgent cat blogging, and therefore I tried to restrain my impulse to post daily pictures, but I think on the anniversary of their homecoming we can visit them again.

Pablo, as you can see, has turned into a very wise old man.

Carlos, well...not so wise, although that is a very smart book he is resting his empty little head on.

These pictures are courtesy of my cell phone, so they are not the greatest. But I think they do a good job of cheering up a dull Tuesday. All of the academic bloggers I read have turned in their grades and are off gallivanting on summer vacations. We here on the quarter system still have a month to go.

Terrible Life Choice?

2007-05-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

Starting in 1919 with True Stories, there has been a small but popular genre of what are called "confession" magazines. Aimed largely at working class white women, they were centered around short stories designed to show you how far people could fall. Lots of stories about infidelity, abortion, incest, drug use, and a surprisingly large number of babies dying in horrific fashion. There would also be articles about fashion, makeup tips, the odd celebrity profile, that sort of thing.

Well in 1950, the publisher of Ebony thought that there might be a market for a confession magazine aimed at African Americans. So for a short-lived period in the early fifties, we have an amazing historical document called Tan Confessions. I came across a reference to it somewhere, and since it is in my period, and I'm currently writing about the so-called "black bourgeoise," I got a microfilm copy via ILL.

Well let me tell you, gold mine! Anybody who is working on music in the fifties has got to check it out. Nearly every issue is divided between these horrific confession stories and interviews with famous black musicians aimed at women. A regular feature is "How I Proposed," with the wives of famous musicians telling the stories of their engagements. Then there are occasional articles written by musicians themselves. There is a hilarious one by Louis Jordan called "What's Wrong With Women?" and another one by Dizzy Gillespie talking about how he doesn't do anything without talking to his wife first. And best of all, for my purposes, there is a lengthy piece penned by none other than Sonny Til, analyzing, in very intelligent and observant ways, why exactly women go crazy over him.

Awesome.

In other news, while taking a break from the microfilm I accidentally walked in on two people having sex in a bathroom in the library. I feel bad for having disturbed them, but they rushed out before I could apologize. Hey, it was a Sunday, nobody was in the library, and it was a very obscure bathroom buried away in the stacks. Go ahead and have anonymous sex with strangers, more power to you.

This is what I was thinking, but then I realized that the only people having a good time in the depths of the library on a beautiful Sunday afternoon were these two gentlemen and myself. What life have I signed up for?

Researching American Music

2007-05-20T02:36:00.000-07:00

Over at Dial M for Musicology, the ever-thoughtful Phil Ford has a post that really threw me for a loop. There's a lot to engage with there; I admit that my immediate reaction was a little defensive, as in some ways he totally has my number. One of the fundamental approaches of my dissertation is looking at a lot of different sites of cultural production in one historical period, and drawing as many parallels as possible. I have some quibbles with his critique of that approach--I don't think there is something inherently wrong with a speculative approach to history, as sticking to just bare bones facts is exactly how certain historical narratives get reified. It's that old archive/repertoire distinction in performance studies: if you just stick to the written record, you're going to miss out on layer after layer of historical knowledge that is often dissenting from and resistant to normative historical narratives. Looking for connections between disparate events is one possible way to attack history from a different angle.

But overall, I definitely share his concern, and one of the main points of my own project is problematizing that annoying Ozzie and Harriet mythology of the fifties. Reflecting further, I think (hope!) what saves my own work from that trap is that I spend an almost excessive amount of time historicizing. I try to do my homework, in other words, and not just make lazy parallelisms. I spend time getting to know my historical subjects, in primary and archival sources. I try to let the music tell me what's going on, rather than assuming my 2007 self knows.

However, there is a structural problem in musicology that stands in the way of doing the kind of work I want to do. This leads me to the real substance of this post, which I'm afraid is going to be somewhat whiny, and most definitely connected to, shall we say, certain material realities of my own life as I await word on funding for next year!

What is with the lack of funding for research in American music? I know of only one source of funding that specifically targets American music, an award given by the Music Library Association. It's all of $2100, which of course would be an honor and a privilege to receive, but only goes so far. And is limited to one or two graduate students a year. And as far as I know, that's it.

So that's the problem: there is precious little money out there to encourage archival work in American music. If you are doing European music, well, sometimes it seems like people are tripping over themselves to give you money. The AMS has no less than three travel grants for research outside of the United States, the Bartlet, the Wolf, and the Powers grants. At my own University, there is a travel grant for research in Europe that my colleagues regularly get, plus a grant within my department for travel which is limited to music before 1950. Plus, there are a number of interdisciplinary centers at my school which give quite a bit a support to musicologists, but are limited in spirit if not name to non-American research: centers for medieval and renaissance studies, for 17th- and 18th-century studies, and so on. And then of course there are the various federal programs like the Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the FLAS, and so on. There are no equivalents for these Eurocentric programs, in the AMS, at my university, or in my department.

Travel outside of the United States is more of expensive of course. It is easier for me to self-fund my research, as I did this last fall when I put a trip to Chicago on my credit card. I had been desperately needing to visit the John Cage papers at Northwestern for years, had never been able to get any funding to do so, and finally just had to suck it up so that I could get my chapter written. But you know, it's not actually that much cheaper. The expense of spending a month looking at archives in, say, New York City is not that different than the expense of a month in Paris. In addition, fellowships are not just about funding; as my friend Sushi PJs pointed out, they also lend your project crucial legitimation.

But most importantly, what kind of message does this send about doing work on American music? It is a loud and clear message from the world of musicology that archival work on American music, and I would argue by extension historical work, is not important or necessary.

And that, my friends, sucks.

It's Too Soon to Know

2007-05-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Write write write. That's what it is all about right now. If I'm going to stick to my (mostly) self-imposed writing schedule, I should have a solid draft of my doo-wop chapter done by the end of this quarter. It is now Week 7, of our ten week quarter, so this would be crunch time. Of course, that is not the only thing I have to write: I'm writing two entries for an encyclopedia that are due in two weeks, plus the introduction to a special section of our graduate student journal. Phew. Luckily, the encyclopedia entries are both topics that are part of my chapter, so there is a certain synergy.

But, anyways, here is some information:

Have you ever wondered where in Baltimore the amazing HBO show The Wire is filmed? There is a great article from the Baltimore City Paper that gives a little tour of some of the locations. Ironically, most of the locations are on the East Side. On the show, most of the focus is on West Baltimore, the black neighborhood traditionally demarcated by Fremont Avenue. But apparently there are less trees on the East Side, which makes season continuity much easier. But you get the idea what it is like in these neighborhoods. The location scout had no problem finding block after block of burnt out row houses, completely empty and desolate.

One of the ongoing themes of The Wire is that we are watching the final chapter of a black community in long decline. But also that before desegregation, urban renewal, and the crack epidemic, these neighborhoods were home to a community that was definitely poor, but had a vibrant life.

In fact, West Baltimore is a crucial location for my dissertation chapter, which is looking at R&B vocal groups of the late forties and early fifties. West Baltimore was home to the greatest of these groups, the Orioles. Would you like to see the street corner upon which the Orioles, still in high school and calling themselves the Vibranaires, used to meet to sing? Show us, Google Maps!

I don't know the city of Baltimore very well, and I can't tell you what this corner looks like from the ground. (Hopefully I will be able to visit this fall!) But one suspects that it is probably not very pleasant right now. Do you remember that scene from Season 3 of The Wire, when the special unit is trying to follow the drug kingpin Avon Barksdale in his car? Remember all those street names the police were radioing to each other in an attempt to find him? That's all right around this spot. In fact, here is another map, courtesy of the Baltimore PD.

This shows crimes within a half mile radius of the street corner. Blue squares are burglaries, red circles are stolen cars, red stars are larceny from a vehicles, green triangles are aggravated assault, and black dots are robberies. Oh, and red crosses are murders. And, you should know that this map is just showing crimes from a two-week period, from April 21 to May 5 of this year.

Does she love me? It's too soon to know.
Can I believe her, when she tells me so?
Is she fooling? Is it all a game?
Am I the fire or just another flame?
A one-sided love would break my heart.
She may be just acting and playing a part.

-The Orioles, "It's Too Soon to Know" (1948)

The image of the golden age of West Baltimore that The Wire and doo-wop fans valorize is probably mostly mythology. It was always a poor neighborhood, and the relative prosperity after World War II was just an illusory moment driven by a temporary rise in manufacturing. I'm sure music is being made here, though, and it is probably good music. But you can start understand the nostalgia. It is hard to imagine the Orioles coming out of today's West Baltimore.

Deep Thought for the Day

2007-05-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: "Does he know his sentence?" "No," said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: "He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on him?" "No," said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: "There would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body."

-Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony

Speaking of things that are a pain in the neck (ha...) why does NBC insist on showing The Office at 8:40, thereby making me choose between it and Grey's Anatomy at 9:00?

I Fell Into a Burning...

2007-05-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

High of 92 today, for the second day in a row. Driving home from school, I noticed a giant plume of grey smoke coming from the hills, behind the observatory. Grey smoke is good, it means that it is just a brush fire. When the smoke from a forest fire turns black, you know that homes are starting to burn. I remember seeing that happen, during the Oakland fire of 1991. That Sunday morning, when I was eleven, the smoke coming from the north was grey, but by mid-afternoon it had turned a thick, oily black, as asphalt, shingles, and gasoline went up in flames.

It reminds me of my first fall in Los Angeles, three and a half years ago. I had purposefully found an apartment on the #2 MTA bus line, which went straight to the music building at school. By October, I had grown accustomed to the bus, even my morning waits for a late bus in the brutal sunshine. But one day, the buses suddenly stopped coming. The mechanics had gone on strike, and the drivers struck in sympathy. I luckily heard the night before, but the next day there were crowds of people at the stops, waiting futilely for their buses. Even today, I still breath a small sigh of relief when I see a bus go by, even if it is in the wrong direction. At least the buses are running.

Then, at about the same time, the workers at most of the area grocery stores also went on strike. Ralphs and Vons stayed open with scabs, but as a loyal member of UAW Local 2865, I wasn't about to cross a picket line. But I was, meanwhile, out of both a means of transportation and food. Then, at the end of a long dry summer, the city slowly started to catch on fire. There was a fire in Pasadena, a fire in Malibu, a fire in the valley, another one to the south. We joked that soon we wouldn't be able to leave the city except by plane or boat. Over Thanksgiving, I did just that, flying off to London to visit Mary. As the plane took off from LAX, I could see the smoke rising from all directions. Los Angeles was hemmed in by a literal ring of fire.

It gets so hot in this city. My apartment is on the top floor of my building, with large view-less windows and nonexistent insulation. We have an ancient air-conditioner cut into one wall. If you turn it on full blast, you get a little puddle of cool air that lets you watch TV in some temporary comfort, but doesn't even get close to the bedrooms. My friends and I invest in fans, swamp coolers, and library expeditions, but there really isn't anything you can do about it. Last summer, when it was sweltering, Pablo would see me panting unhappily on the couch and would come over and drape his warm fuzzy belly on my neck. I considered drowning him in the pool, but I also understood his furry little desire: when it gets that hot, sometimes all you want to do is get hotter, and hope that your ability to feel heat will just burn out.

Every city has its own heat metaphors. For New York, summer heat brings up violence, the Bronx in ~~1978~~ 1977. In Washington, it's that city's former status as a swamp, and the intimation that the slimy politicos that dwell within enjoy such habitats. In the South, you hear endless clichés about laidback attitudes moving slowly in the heat. In Texas, you have George Bush subjecting visitors to the furnace of his ranch, as if that kind of heat will separate the man from the boys.

In Los Angeles, the heat is like our tar pits. It sucks you in, swirls you about, and spits you out a few thousand years later as a fossil. Everyone desperately wants to escape Los Angeles in the heat, but unlike New York or DC, there's nowhere really to go. San Diego? Palm Springs? Las Vegas? Each worse than the last. Your best bet is to drive north, but you have to go a long ways to escape this heat. Instead, those of us trapped in this urban ooze do our best to keep afloat.

But it doesn't look good.

Much Better

2007-05-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

Political crankiness over, and I feel happy and fulfilled:

1. Pleasant social-ness to celebrate friend finishing scary qualifying exams. Expensive tequila consumed, gossip circulated.

2. Productive grading at the local coffeeshop, where the good barista made my cappuccino just the way I like it, and charged me a dollar under the price because she likes me.

3. Lovely conversational stroll through a park in the Hollywood hills with friend. Followed by an excellent triple-chocolate milkshake at Milk.

4. Gig lined up. Going to be doing our 15 minute transgender Elvis whizbang at the LA Pride festival.

5. Self-congratulation for amazing avoidance of active verbs in this list.

This Country, I Tell You What

2007-05-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

Sorry, no poetry this Friday. I'm too cranky.

This past Tuesday there was a big march in Los Angeles to push for immigration reform, one of a number of marches around the country. The day was entirely peaceful and positive, as all of these immigration marches have been. And then, at the end of the day, there was an altercation between some cops and protesters at MacArthur Park. Supposedly, a rock or two might have been thrown, although possibly it was just some plastic water bottles. The police responded by charging the crowd, firing rubber bullets indiscriminately at a mass of people that included families, ice cream vendors, and the usual homeless people that live in the park. Parents dived on top of their toddlers to keep them from being killed by the rubber bullets.

Now, you might not know this, but this stuff happens all the time at protests. And it is usually pretty well-documented. I wasn't at this particular protest, but a bunch of friends of mine were at one of the big anti-IMF protests in Washington, DC back in 2000. The Wesleyan contingent was part of a larger group that was blocking traffic at an intersection, with their arms chained to each other. The student newspaper I worked on, Hermes, published the accounts of these protesters, and here is the story of one friend of mine:

The police bus pulled up around noon. We'd scarcely seen a squad car all morning, and we were off our guard. Everyone in the lockdown circle stood up to see what was going on, which was the worst thing we possibly could have done. The police came off the bus running, and formed a riot line a few feet from our circle. None of them were wearing badges. They didn't even order us to clear the area--one shouted "Let's do this," and they charged us, nightsticks first. In the training sessions, they told us that you're supposed to sit down when the police charge you--that way they can't push people around, knock them over, and start a stampede. Our lock-circle was standing, staring stupidly at the riot visors and shouting for support when they hit us. People's arms started twisting inside the lock-boxes, and they started screaming. A couple unhooked. A soft line formed around us and starting shouting for us to sit down. I sat. The riot officer in front of me looked over at someone who'd just pulled out of his lockbox, looked at me, and drove his nightstick into my face.

I don't know quite what happened next. I was bleeding, screaming, trying to get my arms out of the boxes and figure out where my glasses had landed. There were so many cameras snapping it sounded like machine-gun rounds. When I unhooked my right hand, I saw Sasha, reeling and bleeding, pulling her hand out from the other side. The police backed off--I don't know why--and a second later I was behind the lines, two medics were taking care of me, and a legal observer was interrogating me in the most apologetic tone imaginable.

In the emergency room, they put seven stitches in my face and told me my nose was broken. Sasha had a broken nose and was missing a third of one of her front teeth. And in the hospital waiting room, we watched the network news shows laud the DC police for their restraint.

This stuff really does happen all the time. As Tuesday's march showed, it is rarely related to actual threats from protesters; the LA Times is estimating that there probably about a dozen anarchist-types in MacArthur Park, out of the hundreds of protesters. In the DC case quoted above, the protestors were literally chained to the ground, and were in no position to be a threat to anyone!

Luckily here in LA, MacArthur Park was also home to an area where the press was stationed, underneath a clearly-marked tent and next to their news vans. We're not talking a couple of hippies with video cameras, we're talking the normal national and local news. The police nevertheless pushed through the press, at once point kicking an NBC cameraman while he was on the ground. The national news anchor for Telemundo was roughed up. A woman producer was punched. And so, for once, there is actually some awareness of what happens. Here's a YouTube clip of Brian Williams telling the story:

Know what bothers me? This stuff always goes on at marches, and the media knows it. It's only when their own people get beat up that they get outraged. Know what also bothers me? The so-called progressives in the blogosphere have largely ignored the story--both the marches, and the police violence. Am I missing something or was there not a single post on DailyKos about this? They are so busy worrying about electing Democrats, they could care less that the down are literally being trod upon.

And in other news, today, the president of the American Musicological Society--probably one of the most apolitical, if not downright conservative, scholarly groups out there--emailed all the members to give us an update on Nalini Ghuman. Ghuman is an assistant professor of music at Mills College. (For my non-academic readers, that means she is a full-time faculty member on the tenure track.) She is a British citizen, with degrees from Oxford (BA, MA) Kings College (MA), and UC Berkeley (PhD). Having a job in this country, she has a work visa good through 2008. She went to England this summer for a month to do some research. When she flew back home, to begin her fourth year of teaching, she was detained for eight hours at SFO. Her visa was then revoked, and she was sent back to England.

No explanation.

Eight months later, the government still won't let her come back into the country, as the INS has not yet granted her a security clearance. Again, no explanation. She has apparently heard a rumor that it is a case of mistaken identity, but no official word. While stories like this are sadly a dime a dozen, this really hits home. I don't know Prof. Ghuman, but I do know how difficult it is to be a student in a foreign country, and also how hard it is to get a tenure track job. And to think that it could all be taken away from her because her name is probably similar to the name of someone who once visited the Middle East or something.

Outrageous, and depressing.

Some Debts You'll Never Pay

2007-05-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

As we speak, Patti Smith is playing a show at the Roxy, promoting the new album and kicking off the tour. The Roxy, mind you, is a small club, holding maybe 200 people? And it is walking distance from my apartment. Where am I? At home, because I couldn't get tickets to see one of my favorite performers playing an intimate show at a club in my neighborhood singing new music that would probably rock my world.

To console myself, I bought Arcade Fire's new album, Neon Bible. It is beautiful. I don't care if they went to Exeter. (We're an Andover family, 'round these WASP-y parts.) I'm listening to "Intervention," and it is bringing a lump to my throat. There is a pipe organ (a real one, the organ at St. Jean Baptiste in Montreal), a snare drum lifted from 80's arena rock, a xylophone, strings, who knows what else. There is a simple strophic melody over a repeating vi-IV-I, lots of natural reverb. There are goddamn trumpet fanfares that make you want to pump your fist.

The singer sounds like Bruce Springsteen crossed with Billy Graham. You can't quite make out every word of the lyrics, but you can just tell they are deliciously depressing.

Working for the church
While your life falls apart.
Singing halleluiah with the fear in your heart.
Every spark of friendship and love
Will die without a home.
Hear the solider groan, "We'll go at it alone"
Hear the solider groan, "We'll go at it alone"

But because you can only make out the occasional word, that shouted "We'll got at it alone" starts to feel triumphant, and the music keeps crescendoing, and, and, you're torn between abjection and uplift, and...man. Good stuff. Ineffable, even.

Oops, I almost forgot. Most pop music has a limited emotional range. Nevermind.

Haunts of Men

2007-04-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Thoreau...

In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods

Poetry Friday: Cage's Mesostics

2007-04-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a brief respite from the world of doo-wop today, for a quick plunge back in the world of John Cage. Our department has a competition--with a fairly substantial cash prize--for best dissertation chapter, so I'm doing a little editing and cleaning of my Cage chapter. Part of the editing resulted from finally reading Carolyn Brown's memoirs. Brown was an early member of the Cunningham troupe, and also the first wife of Earle Brown. She spent her whole life hanging around with Cage, and was present at the premiere of 4'33", which is of course the subject of my chapter. I was hoping there would be some juicy detail, but unfortunately the book is very thin on these early years. With a few exceptions, I suspect that she refreshed her memory by looking at the same old secondary sources all of us know. Oh well! I imagine, though, that the book would be extraordinarily useful for those looking at later Cage and Cunningham stuff.

Anyways, it's Poetry Friday, and I realized I've never posted anything by Cage. From the seventies on, Cage almost exclusively wrote in a poetic form he invented called "mesostics." Basically, you take a word, and arrange it vertically. Then you find other words to go across each letter, the main rule being that you can't repeat the vertical letters. So if you chose the word "vertigo" because of the "t", you can't have another "t" until after the next vertical letter.

Cage did these mesostics in many different ways. Sometimes he chose letters and phonemes at random, and then also used chance procedures to randomly change the size and typeface of the letters, as in 62 Mesostics Re: Merce Cunningham. (See an example here. I have a different one of these mesostics tattooed on my back, largely to intimidate other Cage scholars at conferences.) Other times, he more or less wrote in readable prose, but still arranged in the mesostic system.

Why did he do this? In Empty Words, Cage writes that he was inspired by a remark of Norman O. Brown, who pointed out that the word "syntax" is military in origin. And also by a comment of Thoreau, who once wrote that when he heard a sentence, he heard the marching of feet. It was also in this period that Cage did some of his most overtly political music. Cage's politics were always a bit fuzzy, and often annoying, but some of the work of this period is remarkably effective. In the Lecture on the Weather, for instance, is a piece for twelve men, ideally twelve Americans who became Canadian citizens to escape the draft. The men read aloud selections of writings by Thoreau, while recordings (by Maryanne Amacher) of weather sounds blast in the background, and a film (by Luis Frangella) projects photographs of Thoreau's handwriting in negative so that it appears like flashes of lightening. It is a grim, and aggressive, work. It's a little later than Crumb's Black Angels, or middle-period Curtis Mayfield ("(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go"), but shares obvious sympathies. Grim times.

At any rate, here's a slightly more cheerful piece, the beginning of "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegan's Wake. Cage loved Joyce, and decided to improve upon Finnegan's Wake by destroying its syntax even more. The words are chosen from the book, with an emphasis on Joyce's made-up words, and the vertical spine is simply "James Joyce." If you read it aloud, it's quite lovely in its own way.


wroth with twone nathandJoe
                        A
                        Malt
                      jhEm
                        Shen

                     pftJschute
                       sOlid man
          that the humptYhillhead of humself
           is at the knoCk out
                   in thE park

A bunch of my friends are taking or about to take their qualifying exams. Good luck out there! Illegitimi non carborundum.

Progress?

2007-04-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

For a brief, shining, happy, tiny little moment tonight, I had a moment of clarity where I could remember the names, origins, and stylistic distinctions of all the groups in my doo-wop chapter. It lasted about five minutes, but it was wonderful.

I swear, I should make some flash cards or something.

(The Mills Brothers)
(The Inks Spots)
The Ravens (Baltimore)
The Orioles (Baltimore)
The Clovers (Baltimore)
The Dominoes (NYC)
The Cadillacs (NYC)
The Five Keys (NYC)
The Four Fellows (NYC)
The Moonglows (Kentucky-Cleveland)

Argh! My brain just exploded.

Incidentally, Gayle Wald's new biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe is really great. Go buy it.
The Wikipedia entry on Sonny Til is really pathetic, but I don't have the energy to write a decent one.
You know what's a really weird song? The Orioles "Deacon Jones."
Despite a really bad talk I once saw on it, I can listen to the Drifters sing "This Magic Moment" over and over again.
I wonder if my committee would let me write my dissertation in bullet points.

Media I Shall Consume

2007-04-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

1. The new Björk album, Volta. I've been greatly enjoying the first single, "Earth Intruders." Although I liked Medulla and Vespertine, as well as the stuff she did for Drawing Restraint 9, I've been getting a little tired of this introspective phase of her career. My favorite album remains Post, which had a very vibrant, communal spirit to it--mostly, I imagine, because she brought in a wide range of different producers, rather than using just one (Debut) or doing it all herself (most of her stuff since.) Volta apparently has a bunch of different collaborators, including Timbaland. I think that is fabulous, and I'm really excited to hear it. You know, right, that Björk is my favorite music of all time? She's the only popular musician whose albums I buy as soon as they come out, whose shows I go to see whenever I can, and whose career I follow with a fine-tooth comb. Being a musicologist, it is just too exhausting to keep up with contemporary music to the extent that I did at age 15; Björk is the only artist for whom I allow myself complete fandom.

2. Hot Fuzz. Okay, I have already consumed this media. Mary and I saw it in England a few weeks ago. But now that it is out in the US, I want to consume it again, and I want to drag my friends with me. Picture Bad Boys or Die Hard, except set in a picturesque rural English village. (Somerset County, to be exact, so kind of near the Cotswolds.) It is created by the same team that brought you Shaun of the Dead, and although less formally coherent than that masterpiece, it is nevertheless hilarious and pitch-perfect in its analysis of middlebrow English culture. Brilliant. Brilliant!

3. The Sopranos. Well, I am slightly ambivalent about this. I love the show, of course. But for the past two weeks, I have been catching up on the first two seasons of The Wire, another great show. And although The Wire can be rather didactic at times, I love its precise and clean directing, the elegance of its writing, the overall tightness of the production. Going from that world to the world of The Sopranos, well...these new episodes are so weighty, you know? The heavy portent David Chase puts into every single element of The Sopranos is beginning to grate on me a little bit. Obviously, I am going to keep watching, and I still think the show is probably the greatest every produced on American television, but one more good season of The Wire and that might not be so true anymore.

Oh, and I need desperately to get a haircut. I think I need to go a little shorter, to keep pace with my receding hairline. But that's neither here nor there.

Ode to a Fountain

2007-04-17T13:41:00.003-07:00

How I know I am a red-blooded American:

Nothing makes me happier than the fountain shows at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Nothing. Is that so wrong? I mean, honest, they practically bring a tear to my eye. I watched three separate performances this weekend, just couldn't get enough. The first was in the afternoon, some Sinatra tune I didn't recognize. Then, after dinner, Mary and I each bought a 60-ounce strawberry frozen margarita in a souvenir plastic Eiffel Tower container from the stand in front of Paris, and watched over to catch a fountain show done to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." Good enough, but luckily, we waited another 15 minutes for the next show. Wait for it...

"Time to Say Goodbye" by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli.

I swear to god, there is nothing better than strawberry margarita, dancing fountains, and Italy's blindest best. If late capitalism can bring us the Bellagio fountains, then sign me up for late capitalism.

And I am not alone. My friend Kelsey pointed me towards this amazing article in the Guardian on the guilty pleasures of famous academics. Homi Bhaba loves Project Runway. Anthony Giddens loves pro wrestling. Stanley Fish loves country music. Slavoj Zizek likes violent computer games. And although I won't name names, I have had conversations about the Bellagio fountains with many other academics. And many of these other academics admit to secretly loving the fountains, even to being quite moved by them.

I wonder why. A lot of pleasure comes from the simple conjunction of music with moving image. "Mickey mousing," as film music types call it, especially in a live situation, is always a good time. It's similar to a fireworks show, with escalating climaxes in music and image.

Also, there is the medium. How often do you get to see water dancing around? And man, those jets shoot high up into the air! But more than that, I think one of the greatest thrills is the resemblence of water to human bodies. It's most evident when the center circle of fountains does this move that looks like dancers leaning backwards. (This picture kind of shows it.) And obviously the choreography of the fountains is based largely on basic ballet choreography, with lots of synchronization. Like ballet, the synchronization is both mechanical and imperfect; the coordination is impressive, but the use of water means that it is not entirely controlled. Drops and mist fly around in the wind, and the changing light plays off the lake differently every time. It's not like watching a screensaver. At the same time, the fountains obviously are more than human. They are mechanical, and they exceed human limits. One of the common fountain moves is for the fountains to jet off in a line across the thousand foot installation, culminating in an explosion of the tall center jets. You see that kind of move in human dancing all the time--think the Rockettes kicking their legs--but it's something else to see it happen on such a gigantic scale.

You can see some videos here.

Ramblin' On My Mind

2007-04-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

Richard Lacayo proposes that now that Sol LeWitt has passed away, his large-scale drawings--usually created in galleries by assistants following his written instructions--should be treated like musical scores, which is to say available for "performances" and new interpretations by anyone who wishes to give it a go, rather than highly controlled by the estate. (Via M.A.N). Interesting! What do you think, learned reader?

In other news, we are off to Vegas tomorrow, just for one night, to celebrate yesterday's board exams. I love Las Vegas, I really do. My high school orchestra went there twice, and when I was moving out to LA four years ago, we won $150 at the slots.

We are also celebrating the fact that it is my 27th birthday tomorrow.

Famous musicians who died when they were 27?

Kurt Cobain
Jimi Hendrix
Jim Morrison
Brian Jones
Janis Joplin
Robert Johnson

Maybe I didn't pick the best year of my life to attempt to move across the country, get married, and go on the job market. These activities already have a fairly high mortality rate as it is.

Poetry Friday: Yeats

2007-04-13T23:55:00.000-07:00

It has been a long week, but a good one. Today Mary took her American board exams. They went well enough, but she won't know if she passed for another month or so. For those of you keeping track, these are the same exams all veterinarians must take to practice in the United States. Some individual states also have addition boards, but not Pennsylvania, where we hope to move this fall. If she was going to an American veterinary school, the boards would count as her final exam, and she would basically be done now. However, she still has to go back to the UK next week and finish up her courses there, and then sit through more exams to receive her degree. That's the downside, but the upside is that when she finishes all this, she will have both a "DVM" and a "MCRVS" (Master of the College of Royal Veterinary Surgeons") after her name, which is pretty cool.

The other good thing about this week is of a subject I shan't blog about. But suffice it to say, I'm in a good mood. So with that, I leave you with the poem of the week! A little Yeats for April, by special request.

William Butler Yeats, "Cloths of Heaven" (1899)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Say Goodbye to the Library

2007-04-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

This last Friday was closing day for libraries in Jackson Country, Oregon. I've blogged about this before; basically, the economic and political situation in Oregon, especially southern Oregon, is so dire that when Federal timber subsidies ended, there was no money for such luxuries.

My mother volunteers at the the Ashland Public Library, and was working there on the last day. There were a lot of tears, and patrons brought in flowers for the staff. Most amazing, however, was a group of kids who organized a peaceful sit-in. The local paper filmed the proceedings, which features Sgt. Williams, the most amazing police officer you will ever meet. The whole thing is heart-rending.

Ashland is a wealthy town, by Oregon standards, and is populated largely by refugees from San Francisco, like my parents, who would cheerfully tax themselves for such things. I'm sure the town will be able to work something out, possibly turn the library into a municipal function, albeit one without the larger support crucial for libraries. But the real tragedy is all of the other libraries in Jackson Country, many of which are scattered across extremely rural and impoverished areas. Those libraries are not going to be able to re-open any time soon, and southern Oregon will lose just a bit more of itself.

Nothing Metonymic About This One

2007-04-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

I just had my very first fellowship anxiety dream. In my dream, I got rejected from a certain fancy national fellowship from which in real life I have yet to hear. But it wasn't just an email rejection, in my dream. Rather, I received an automated phone call. And rather than simply informing me I didn't receive the fellowship, the pre-recorded voice broke the fellowship down into all the little expenses for which it would have paid, and rejected me one by one. Like, "Here are the results of your application for the X Fellowship: You did not receive $500 for travel to archives in New York. You did not receive $5000 towards tuition. You did not receive $12000 to pay your rent." And so on.

Happy Easter!

Gobama

2007-04-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

This is so awesome.

Also, I'd like to point out that I just tried to schedule an eye exam to renew my contact lens prescription, and the first available appointment was May 21st at 7:45 am. That's 47 days away. I suspect that a student health center with 35,000 students might want to have more than one optometrist.

Beer on the Last Day

2007-04-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last day in Barnet. Borrowing a friend's little car (a tiny little automatic Geo Metro complete with a choke) Mary, Molly and I drove around Hertfordshire doing a little pub hopping. We vaguely knew of a country pub we wanted to try, but not knowing where it was we just pointed the car North and resolved to see what we could find.

First stop was the Candlestick, which we ran into by accident outside of Essendon. It was a nice little building, but mostly empty, and the barman looked like he'd had a rough Saturday night. We were able to take our drinks--I had a pint of McMullen's AK Bitter--out into a garden where we could enjoy the rare sunshine.

From there, we noticed a sign pointing the way towards Wildhill, where the phantom pub was supposedly located. Sure enough, we ran straight into the Woodman. Unfortunately, it was closed during the afternoon, so we had to forge on ahead to the Five Horseshoes. I started out here with a Courage Directors Bitter. Growing hungry, we sat down and all three of us had beef and ale pies, washed down for me with Old Speckled Hen. The beer was good, but the pie was literally the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. But then Mary had to go and order a Corona, which completely destroyed the ambience of the photo above.

Tomorrow, Los Angeles bound!

Ain't That the Truth

2007-04-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

Reuters: Frequent Long-Haul Flights Hard on the Body

Airplane crew and passengers who frequently fly between several time zones face a number of health problems including disruptions in a woman's menstrual cycle and even short-term psychiatric disturbances, researchers from the UK warn in a report published Thursday in The Lancet.

St. Paul's and Beyond

2007-03-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

I've managed, somehow, never to go to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. I've been to the Tower and Westminster Abbey zillions of times, but the third in the holy trinity of London tourism has always evaded me for some reason. So yesterday, I finally made it there.

I was a little underwhelmed. I hadn't realized how closely it mimics St. Peter's in Rome, right down to the baldacchino over the high altar. (quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Wren?) And of course, it can't really match up to St. Peter's in size or sense of majesty. In fact, I was quite struck by how unspiritual the whole affair seemed. It's ironic that Westminister, which as a Royal Peculiar is more officially nationalist than St. Paul's, feels much more religious. I don't think it is just the Gothic versus early neo-classical architecture, but I can't quite put my finger on what the difference is. At first I thought it was because the cathedral seemed oddly tatty. There wasn't a ton of interior detail, and what details there were seemed a bit rough. But then, I've been to some other cathedrals that also seemed plain inside, like the one in St. Albans, or even the cathedral in Cuernevaca, Mexico. Those cathedrals were once more ornate, but at some point in history had been ransacked (by Henry the XIII and leftists, respectively.) But I found their plain interiors rather beautiful, whereas for me St. Paul seemed oddly institutional, like the community room stuck on to the back of a Methodist church. Of course, Mary the Presybeterian looked at the altar and sniffed that there was an awful lot of gold. Guess it's all about perspective.

I do admit that there was a great view from the top, however. I had to swallow my claustrophobia a bit to make it up the 300 steps of a tiny, crowded spiral staircase, but it was quite lovely. The picture above is from the top, looking southwest towards the London Eye and Parliament beyond.

Afterwards we made a quick trip to the Tate Modern, to check out the infamous slides that are installed in the atrium. We each went down the short one, which had less of a line. Then it was off to the National Gallery, to check out the free exhibition "From Manet to Picasso." It's just a temporary exhibit to give a home to some of the famous impressionist and post-impressionist artworks from the permanent collection which are displaced by a touring show. It was nice to see some oldies but goodies of impressionism, but I wasn't very impressed with the curacy--I wish they had been more creative in their "redisplay." One treat was seeing a Hammershøi, an artist I didn't know of but who we quite liked.

Today: work!

Barneted

2007-03-26T03:27:00.000-07:00

By the way...did I mention I'm in England right now? As is my typical fashion, I skipped out of town mere hours after finishing grading for the quarter. No jet lag to speak of this time; after five years of constant traveling like this, my body no longer has any problem with suddenly skipping ahead eight hours. I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

Saturday was spent at the antique markets in Notting Hill, indulging Mary's addiction to funky jewelry. Sunday we met a fellow expatriate Los Angeleno musicologist (it's a small but close-knit community) for drinks in Primrose Hill, before coming back to Barnet for baked ziti. Today, I think we are going to lounge around and go see The Good German, which is still in theaters over here.

So, in lieu of a substantive post, I'm going to fill out SoHo the Dog's survey.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

To go with something recent, I liked the libretto for Dr. Atomic much more than John Adams's wishy-washy music.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

I'm not a Gould person.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

Charles Ives. I've actually somehow managed to avoid listening to The Sun Treader all these years, at least until last week when it was a bonus question on a final I proctored. Not so impressed.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

See #2.

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

This isn't really an answer to the question, but I just want to state that despite the fact that Schubert apparently hated the instrument, the viola lines in everything he wrote are truly beautiful.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

Hmm...I'm thinking...Harvey Milk set in Renaissance Florence. It could totally work.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

When I was undergraduate, my university had a very strong world music performance program, and there was lots of great concerts by the resident gamelan ensemble. However, invariably, there would be a smattering of (always white men of a certain age) audience members who would show up wearing traditional Javanese tunics, and would sit cross-legged during the performance with beatific smiles on their faces. That was very unfortunate.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

Patti Smith!

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

I have a soft spot for Sibelius.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

If you've ever seen the film clip of Furtwangler conducting the Ninth, with Goebbels and a bunch of wounded war veterans in the audience and gigantic swastikas hanging over the stage, you'll find it quite easy not to listen to it ever again.

An Irish Retraction

2007-03-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Plus Side: I have very cool grandparents. In fact, all four of them read my blog. How many grandparents of people my age use the internet, let alone read their grandson's blog?

The Negative Side: When one blogs about one's family, one's grandparents will read one's posts about one's family history, and one's possible inaccuracies will be pointed out, to one. Suffice it to say, there is an Irish branch of my family. Protestant Irish, of course, but Irish nevertheless. In fact, when my grandparents moved to Montreal in the sixties, the Canadian immigration people listed my grandmother as "Irish" because of her maiden name. So there you have it.

I feel a little bit like George Allen.

Print, and Music

2007-03-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

When it comes down to it, I'm pretty print-based in my media tastes. I value mashed-up tree and ink. I still remember the joy, when growing up, of going down to the main branch of the Oakland Public Library, not just for books, but to browse all the crazy left-wing free newspapers in its lobby. My introduction to left wing politics--I think I was in about eighth grade or so--came from picking up a copy of The People, the official house organ of the Socialist Labor Party. I soon realized that they were completely nutso, but there was (and is) immense pleasure in seeing subversive ideas smeared in cheap ink on newsprint. In college I helped edit an alternative newsmagazine that barely existed (does it still, I wonder? Doesn't look good from the web site!) but managed to pull itself together every few months to print an issue. Today, I subscribe to The Nation and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and I get The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Wax Poetics thanks to the munificence of family and friends. If I had the money, I would subscribe to many more.

And although I spend an extraordinary amount of time online consuming information, even there I have certain aesthetic desires that are fundamentally print-oriented. I hate RSS feeds for instance, vastly preferring to visit individual blogs one by one rather than to strip the text out of its original context. Similarly, part of the reason I started a blog was that I didn't like how in Livejournal, which all of my friends use, it is the reader, not the author, who gets to choose the layout and formatting of entries.

That said, I would like to register a complaint about The Nation. For many years, Edward Said was the music critic for The Nation, and that was great. Since he died, however, there has been no consistent music critic! Jody Rosen was on the masthead for awhile, but I don't think anyone is listed now. Since I and probably most subscribers read The Nation solely for the cultural criticism, I hope they fix this! For instance, the issue I happen to have next to me, January 29, has Martin Duberman doing a great review of Daniel Hurewitz's new book, and Arthur Danto talking about Manet and modernism. The last major music thing I can remember was Paul Griffith's annoyingly dim review of the Taruskin behemoth. Maybe there was a short thing about jazz recently. Come on people! If you can have an official in-house architecture critic, you can have a music critic. Don't worry, we come cheap.

Who's that a-writin'?

2007-03-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

This post is just an experiment to see if I can have audio examples on this blog using a Flash-based player. This player was created by 1pixelout, and I followed the Blogger-specific instructions from here. Let me know if it doesn't work for you! Older computers, and those without a Flash plug-in installed, might have difficulty.

This is a clip of Blind Willie Johnson singing "John the Revelator," one of the tracks recorded for the 1927-1930 Columbia sessions. I just finished reading 30 undergraduate writing assignments about this tune, so I am now something of an expert. Well, an expert in the weird ways that an undergraduate--with little training in analyzing pop music and a deep willingness to trust Wikipedia--can listen to this song. It is a pretty bizarre little tune, I have to say, and I can't really blame them for having trouble with it.

Is it legal to have a clip of a copyrighted song here? Well, the legality of such things is actually highly unclear. There has yet to be a definitive court case on the subject, and fair use statutes are very vague and outdated. Few people have gotten in trouble with having clips that are less than a minute long, since that is more or less the equivalent of providing a short quote from a book. Certain online music journals have used the "one minute example" as a good rule of thumb, although as a non-profit academic journal, there might be a better case for Fair Use than for a personal blog. But who knows, really. I feel like that if I am only have a clip, and if I am making it at least mildly more difficult to download thanks to the Flash player, I've covered my bases as much as I can.

A Non-Irish Family Story

2007-03-17T13:36:00.000-07:00

As far as I know, I don't have any Irish in me. Red hair and freckles run in my mother's family, but given where it comes from--my mother's maternal grandmother--I suspect that it is Dutch in origin, from my ancestors who immigrated to what was then known as New Amsterdam. In fact, with exception of the odd Swede here and there, I have hardly any ancestors on either side of my family who did not emigrate from either England or the Netherlands before the American Revolution, and most of them in the seventeenth-century. I say that not to brag, but as an ambivalent testimony to the power of racial politics in this country over the last three centuries. The fact that really none of my ancestors married into the various great waves of immigration over the years tells you something rather dark about the history of the U.S.

Anyways.

I do have a funny story about Irish ancestry though. I have some cousins who are themselves members of another family--so, to which I myself am not related--that is kind of fancy. I probably shouldn't say it by name, but suffice to say there is are some important institutions in NYC named after them. It's the kind of family that has a corporation to manage the family assets and charitable giving and whatnot, and has developed a complex system of classification to sort themselves out. I can never remember the details, but basically, each of the many children of the original patriarch was assigned a letter, and then each generation thereafter a number, so that if you are like the fourth grandchild of Robber Baron X's third daughter, you are C-2-4. I'm getting it wrong, but it something like that. When they have family reunions, each branch gets a color, and people wear badges with their numbers.

Anyways, so the name of this family is generically WASP, maybe with a hint of Scottish to it, everyone had always assumed. For whatever reason, nobody had ever done a proper genealogy on the family founder, so for an upcoming family reunion the board of directors of the family trust decided to hire someone to make one. They hired a young genealogist to do the research, and she presented the preliminary results at a board meeting.

The young women was excited to report that she had discovered that the patriarch's ancestors were....Irish!

Dead silence in the boardroom.

She was politely thanked, and as soon as she had left, one of the more elderly members of the board turned to the room, scowled, and said "Pay her, and get rid of her!"

No presentation was made at the family reunion. And yes, this was just a few years ago.

Useful Advertising

2007-03-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

The Sunset Strip is home to many billboards. After Times Square, it is one of the most important outdoor advertising locations in the world. Many of them are gigantic, taking up the entire sides of twenty-story buildings; others have mechanized props attached to them. The Chateau Marmont always has a slender, vertical one in some odd shape: a bottle of Absolut Vodka for several years, now a big iPod. There are several giant video screens, and one non-chain billboard on the side of the Rainbow Grill that always has sexually explicit ads for new pornos.

But the most important billboard is a large one on the side of an office building. It seems to be leased exclusively by HBO, and is used to announce whatever the next big upcoming HBO series will be. Since I drive by it every day on the way home from school, I'm usually pretty on top of the HBO calendar. So you can imagine my joy when I saw they were putting up a new ad today.
This is my cell phone camera so it's a little washed out and blurry, but that's Tony Soprano. And underneath, it says, "The Final Episodes: April 8."

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Rest in Peace, Betty Hutton

2007-03-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

As regular readers will know, I vastly prefer Calamity Jane, the 1953 rip-off of Annie Get Your Gun, to the original. However, Betty Hutton was definitely the best part of that inferior musical, making the obnoxious plot almost palatable. Plus, in 1948, by getting pregnant shortly before the filming of Romance on the High Seas, Betty paved the way for the Great Doris herself. So God Bless, Betty. I hope in heaven they let you win any sharpshooting contest you want.

You can ignore the rest of this post, unless you are looking for an explanation of my relative frazzledness. It is my to-do list for the week:

1. ~~Write something to give to diss. reading group.~~
2. ~~Grade 30 short writing assignments.~~
3. Grade another 30 short writing assignments.
4. Grade two week's worth of listening quizzes.
5. Write and FedEx abstract for conference. (What kind of organization requires paper copies of an abstract?)
6. Prepare guest lecture for Thursday's class.
7. Collect 30 term papers. Grade them.
8. Finish fellowship application, which involves...
9. Do long overdue revisions to first diss chapter, to hand in with #8.
10. Enjoy some sunshine.

Notes from Pop Culture

2007-03-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll is the most depressing television experience I have ever had. It is one thing to watch American Idol--I try not to, but it happens--and see all these kids put their heart and soul into being a famous singer. It is another thing to watch a teenage girl wearing nothing but skimpy lingerie cry because being a Pussycat Doll is her lifelong dream.

John Cage in Tehran

2007-03-11T01:55:00.000-08:00

Know what's cool? Last Thursday night, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra performed Cage's Four⁶. The Cage community is understandbly all a-twitter. The late number pieces are not my favorite, but how often do you see major American orchestras performing any Cage at all!

The press releases don't mention it, interestingly, but Cage himself performed in Iran once, at the 1972 Shiraz Arts Festival--a festival originally created to celebrate the 2,5000 year anniversary of the founding of Persia. You can read an article about it here. [pdf] The concert was sponsored directly by the Shah himself, and was no doubt undertaken with the support of the U.S. government.

Marshall Berman later wrote, "When a creative spirit like John Cage accepted the support of the Shah of Iran, and performed modernist spectacles a few miles from where political prisoners shrieked and died, the failure of moral imagination was not his alone." That's rather sanctimonious, but he had a bit of a point. It's nice to know that at least for one evening this week, Cage's music was being used for slightly less imperialistic ventures.

-------
This is what I get for not keeping up with my blog reading: everyone in the world has already posted about this. (I really wish I could read that last one, it looks fascinating!)

The Age of Anxiety

2007-03-07T00:33:00.000-08:00

Rather than working on my current dissertation chapter, a partial draft of which is due on Saturday, I would like to muse about the last chapter I intend to write. Thus, a short improvisational history of The Age of Anxiety, using only the information I have on my bookshelf at the moment.

The Age of Anxiety is the title of two different literary works from the 1940s: a "baroque eclogue" by Auden, and the first chapter of the late Arthur Schlesinger's famous book The Vital Center.

Auden:

When the historical process breaks down and armies organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to the bar business.

Schlesinger:

Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk. Most of the world has reconciled itself to this half-light, to the reign of insecurity. Even those peoples who hastily traded their insecurities for a mirage of security are finding themselves no better off than the rest.

Marx said it more succinctly: "All that is solid melts into air."

I don't know that Schlesinger read Auden. Haven't researched it yet. I would guess not, but that's probably because I have a low opinion of Schlesinger, so I assume the worst. But Leonard Bernstein did read Auden, and the same year that The Vital Center was published, he composed his Symphony No. 2, subtitled "The Age of Anxiety." I haven't spent much time with it yet, haven't even checked out a score. Befitting the source material, I wonder if there will be pastoralisms. Or even a quote of the Sabine Baring-Gould hymn that Auden quotes in the beginning:

Now the day is over
Night is drawing nigh.
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky.

It would be cool if this tune is quoted, it's one of my favorite hymns. My main exposure to Anglican hymns comes not from church, but from attending a weekly hymn singing in the summers while growing up. This is the hymn we sing to close each meeting. It's a pretty hymn, one of those ones where it is impossible to sing just the tune--I can't hum it without trying to hum all four parts. Come to think of it, I've never really thought about this hymn analytically before. Thanks to my handy Episcopal hymnal--the 1940 one, of course, just to be chronologically consistent--I see that good ol' No. 172 (the Merrial tune) has some kind of interesting harmonic stuff going on. But now I'm getting off track.

Anyways, so Bernstein composed his symphony. Then in 1950, Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet to this music. I don't really know anything about this ballet, other than Robbins danced one of the main roles himself. I wonder if there is any record of what the dance was like. Maybe it's even still in the City Ballet's repertoire. Probably not. I don't know a whole lot about ballet; when I think of Jerome Robbins I tend to think of West Side Story, and it is a little hard to imagine the Jets and the Sharks dancing to any of the above music or literary sources. But I suspect the ballet made sense. I hope I can track down more concrete details about it.

Why the age of anxiety? Every age seems anxious. Many people are anxious now. Marx was anxious. Sabine Baring-Gould, who wrote the hymn not long after Marx, seems anxious:

Grant to little children
Visions bright of Thee;
Guard the sailors tossing
On the deep, blue sea.

Comfort those who suffer,
Watching late in pain;
Those who plan some evil
From their sin restrain.

So why is it in the Age of Anxiety in the late 1940s? Was there more anxiety then, than now, or previously? Was it the Holocaust? World War II? the Cold War? McCarthyism? Civil rights? Women in the workplace? Abstract Expressionism? Be-bop? I doubt people were more anxious in 1949 than in 2007, or 1868, or 1847. But I don't know, maybe they were. Maybe the choice of the word "anxiety" is important--there is a huge growth in American-style Freudian psychiatry in this period. Today we usually speak of "fear" rather than "anxiety." Marx doesn't even us the word "anxiety" in the Manifesto. To experience anxiety might be transhistorical, but to convince oneself of the fundamental anxiousness of the present time might be historically specific.

Que Sera, Sera

2007-03-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

I've been at a conference this past week, is why the absence of posting. It was a good conference; I caught up with friends, saw a new city, played with gigantic helium-filled silver mylar balloons, drank my fair share of the city's beer supply, and ate a lot of McDonalds. Plus, I gave a paper at this conference, and it was very well-received. I was proud of how I delivered it--I tend to be a bit of a mumbler, so performing an academic paper properly is something I've worked on a lot. And not only did my paper go well, but I saw a lot of stimulating papers by other scholars, had many good academic conversations, met lots of fascinating new people, and got lots of good advice from other students, professors at other schools, and even a publisher or two. And furthermore my first academic publication came out this weekend. It's a very minor publication, to be sure, but it is neat to see your name in print, all professionally typeset and everything.

It was really a great conference; it is every year. I'm always amazed how this one particular annual musicological conference can be so productive, when the "main" musicological conference can make you want to drill a hole in a vital organ. It's actually not too hard to figure out the difference, but here I run into one of the main problems with my blog: it is neither anonymous nor non-anonymous. I don't quite feel comfortable delivering honest opinions about things that intersect so directly with my "career." If it was anonymous, I could dish all I want, albeit in vague, coded terms. If it was under my real name, I could brag more annoyingly about accomplishments, and attempt to attach to the real me whatever intellectual capital and good publicity a blog can produce. (Heh.)

My friends and family read this, and if you read this blog and don't happen to know me, it takes about ten seconds of googling to figure out who I am. Recent linkage from blogs read by a lot of people in my field has meant that I'm getting many visitors I don't personally know. I'm okay with that; I have to be. I feel confident enough in myself that I figure that people knowing me better is a good thing. And yet, a lot of the postings here are personal enough that I prefer not to actually have my name attached directly, at least for the time being. My theory is that I would just rather not have people be able to google my real name and find Barnet Bound. It would not be a disaster if somebody made the connection, as I run a fairly clean ship, but I like to cut down on undergraduates and future employers making the direct link. Probably when I go on the job market this fall, I'm going to stop blogging here, and move to a new address under my real name. Maybe I'll split it in two: an anonymous blog full of gossip and scandalous stories--since my life is obviously that interesting--and a named one that pretends to be a real grown-up. We'll see. Whatever will be, will be.

I'd like to thank the Academy...

2007-02-27T19:36:00.000-08:00

In a first for my long but undistinguished career of Oscar pools, I actually won this year. I got 19 out of 24, handily beating my nearest competitor at 14 out of 20. Fifteen dollars was mine! It was all thanks to hitching myself to the Pan's Labyrinth and The Departed trains, and also some lucky guesses in the shorts--I figured a flick about Israel and Palestine was a sure bet, as was something about blood and China.

Picture is courtesy of Violet Vixen, and the statuette courtesy of the party host, whose father actually won an Oscar once. They are much heavier than they look.

Seen at a Coffee Shop on Sunset Boulevard

2007-02-24T18:11:00.000-08:00

1. An elderly man looking at the profiles of young women on MySpace. From what I can see, they were all in his friends list. Questions: Are they his actual friends? Does he pretend to be younger online? Do they like (much) older men? Is he famous? Is he sketchy?
2. Donald Faison, who plays Turk on Scrubs.
3. A big SUV pulled into the left-hand turning lane at an intersection, as if waiting to turn left. Then the blinkers came on, and a guy got out and walked off, leaving the car blinking away in the middle of Sunset Boulevard.
4. A young couple wearing University of South Carolina t-shirts, looking disoriented.
5. Several rock musicians with lots of tattoos--I recognized them, but couldn't tell you what band.
6. Helen Mirren's face plastered on a gigantic "for your consideration" billboard.
7. Ratio of 1 double cappuccino per 5 midterms graded.
8. Two elderly Russian men smoking cigars and playing chess.
9. A pretty woman who was totally a famous actress, but I can't remember her name. Except she had a crazy mole next to her eye that they must airbrush out when she is filmed.
10. An Alan Arkin lookalike. But it wasn't him, I decided.

Poetry Friday

2007-02-23T23:43:00.000-08:00

I am pleased to announce the return of Poetry Fridays. I have not been avoiding them on purpose, it's just that I keep forgetting. So in keeping with my earlier post on those darned Anglicans, I give you some T.S. Eliot. I read this poem in high school, and really loved it for some reason. My copy is all marked up with little high school scribbles, where I pointed out to myself with awe that the three trees symbolize the three crucifixes. (You know, Jesus and the Two Thieves. Sounds like a doo-wop group.) I think it is the intense foreshadowing that really impressed my seventeen-year-old self; I have always really loved anticipating something that you know is coming. Even if it's, you know, a crucifixtion.

The Journey of the Magi (1927)

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Obamamania

2007-02-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

Pursuant to my primary pondering, I went today to the Barack Obama rally in Los Angeles. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. He was a charismatic speaker, but in an unusual way. He speaks surprisingly slow, with a deep but precise tone. It takes a moment to get used to the slow pace, and the pauses, but by the end of the speech it does a great job of convincing you that he is both thoughtful and passionate. Those are unusual qualities to hear in a politician's speech.

Also, he is a very good looking man. And he is, I believe, the first presidential candidate ever not to have politician's hair.

But the most impressive thing about the rally for me was the crowd. It was a big crowd, first of all; the papers are saying "in the thousands." That's pretty neat considering the primary is over a year away. But more importantly, it was one of the most diverse political events I have ever been too. Truly multi-racial, a wide range of ages, lots of different causes, and a ton of enthusiasm and energy. And as Kelsey pointed out, you don't get the feeling that it was stage-managed by his staff. There wasn't even a lot of publicity for the event, I just happened to notice on his web site that LA was the next stop on his tour. I've been to a lot of political rallies over the years, and there was a new energy at this one.

So I guess I can officially say...Go Obama!

----------------------
Update: The SF Chronicle just posted an article about the rally. It's a nice positive article, but it just goes to show what most reporting is like:
1) It claims 7,000 people were there. That's not even close to true--the local news is saying 3k, which sounds about right.
2) Hordes of uniformed school children? I must have somehow missed these hordes.

I Will Not Cease From Mental Fight

2007-02-20T00:46:00.000-08:00

Given that I'm not a regular churchgoer, and that most of my appreciation for the Episcopal Church has Anglophilic rather than theological origins, I'm surprised how upset the ongoing saga of the Anglican Communion has made me. I find the whole thing heartbreaking, almost irrationally so. The process has been so blatantly unfair, so unbelievably hypocritical. I'm angry at the various conservative African primates, I'm angry at the crazy Virginia evangelicals, but to be honest, most of my anger is directed at the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, our supposed leader. I have no doubt he is a good man, but his lack of leadership is the real problem at the heart of this. Of course, one of the reasons liberals still cling to him sometimes is that if he leaves, he could be replaced by someone worse.

I don't feel like recapping the whole thing here. Today's Guardian sums up the recent developments fairly, and you'll see what I mean by Williams's failure of leadership. For exhaustive but addicting commentary from a liberal perspective, see The Daily Episcopalian.

Things that make me particularly angry:

*Newspaper articles that refer to the two sides as the "traditionalist" and "liberal" positions. I'm sorry, but the sector of the Episcopal Church that is most opposed to gay ordination and same-sex blessings is not traditional in the least, it's an offshoot of right-wing fundamentalism that grew out of the Moral Majority 1980s. For better or for worse, the white northeastern urban elite that has been traditionally identified with the Episcopal Church for so long is actually the pro-gay element. It's the more recently additions to the Communion that are anti-gay. That obviously reveals some of the more problematic elements of what the Anglican Church is like today, but nevertheless, stop calling them traditionalists!

*So, the crazy wingnut former Episcopalians in Virgina have voted to put themselves under the authority of the Nigerian church. The Nigerian Anglicans support, among other things, the criminalization of sodomy (punishable by death in some cases), the complete subordination of women, and--get this--limited acceptance of polygamy! So desperate are the Virginia evangelicals to escape the terror of co-existing in the same organization with congregations that have gay pastors that they are okay with this!

*Archbishop Williams has not once made any gesture of compromise towards the Americans. No matter how many decidedly un-Christian humiliations and power plays the anti-gay contingent has suffered upon the American church, it is always our fault. The Episcopal Church has bent over backwards to reach reconciliation, and the Virginian-Nigerian axis always responds with pettiness. This, for me, is the heart of the frustration. The Episcopal Church has moved slowly on the gay issue, much slower than its membership would actually have liked. And the energy for these various liberal moves was very much a grassroots, congregational impulse, that only finally caught up to the national church a few years ago. There has been no haste in these decisions, and the fact that a miniscule number of congregations have left over the issue--many fewer than left over the ordination of women--shows how widespread the acceptance is for gay rights in the American church. And then, on the other side, you have people who think that homosexuality should be punished by death. No compromise.

Sometimes I wish we had a pope.

To Everyone Elsewhere

2007-02-17T14:41:00.000-08:00

It was about this time of year, four years ago, when I visited my current academic home as a prospective student. I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time, and you can imagine what the weather was like. I promise the blooming flowers on campus weren't the only reason I came here. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't dream about flowers and sunshine when I got back to New England.

Don't ever change, LA.

1980

2007-02-15T17:03:00.000-08:00

I'm the same age as Macaulay Culkin? That kind of weirds me out, for some reason.

In 1980 (the year you were born)

Jimmy Carter is president of the US

President Carter announces punitive measures and embargos against the USSR in retaliation for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupts in a violent blast estimated to be 500 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb

Ronald Reagan is elected the 40th US president in a sweeping victory

US Representative Michael O. Myers is expelled from the House for his role in the Abscam scandal

Hewlett-Packard announces release of its first personal computer

Microsoft announces their version of UNIX, Xenix

Christina Ricci, Chelsea Clinton, Venus Williams, Jessica Simpson, Macaulay Culkin, and Jake Gyllenhaal are born

Philadelphia Phllies win the World Series

Pittsburgh Steelers win Superbowl XIV

New York Islanders win the Stanley Cup

The Empire Strikes Back is the top grossing film

"Lady" by Kenny Rogers spends the most time at the top of the US charts

U.S. viewers get caught up in the "Who Shot J.R.?" cliff hanger on the soap opera series, Dallas, which is solved on a November 21 episode, drawing a record numbers of viewers

What Happened the Year You Were Born?

Like a Candle in the Wind

2007-02-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

In all the hubub over Anna Nicole Smith's death, I forgot that I actually had a close personal connection to her. In 2005, at the West Hollywood Pride Parade, she blew a kiss in my direction. I felt pretty special. I even managed to take this picture. (That's Stravinsky's IHOP behind her.)
The best thing? See the shirtless guy to her left, who looks like he is sniffing something off his thumb? You can click the picture for a larger version. According to TMZ and Defamer, that's a certain Dr. Sandeep Kapoor. He is the doctor who supposedly prescribed poor Anna methadone, two weeks before she was due to give birth. That methadone, of course, probably killed Anna's son, and possibly Anna herself.

See, it's the brushes with fame like this that make living in Los Angeles worth it.

1, 2, 3, 4

2007-02-12T14:38:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wanted to see a stop-motion animation version of Einstein on the Beach, done with legos? I have.

Sometimes, YouTube makes my day. I wish, of course, that they had used the vastly superior 1979 recording, but the 1993 will do.

Choices, Choices

2007-02-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Will somebody please tell me who to support in the Democratic primary? I'm not usually this far behind. In December of 1998 I was already a member of the Connecicut Committee for Wellstone. I still have my green "Wellstone for President" t-shirt. The silk-screening is fraying a bit, so now it's only for special occasions. And I still remember my first primary, 1988. I was in...third grade, I think? I was a Jesse Jackson supporter, and then reluctanctly campaigned for Dukakis when my elementary school had a mock election. Since I grew up in the Easy Bay, I think Dukakis won by like 80%. I distinctly remember that there was only person in my classroom who dared vote for Bush Sr.

But when you are writing a dissertation, it is hard to remember the outside world. So somebody tell me what to do:

1. Hillary Clinton.
Ick. Nope nope nope. I've never been a fan of the Clintons--remember DOMA, don't ask don't tell, the end of welfare as we know it, and several spurious bombings of random countries?--and that distrust overrides my mild desire for a woman candidate. I don't like her peddling to the right, I don't like her consistent support of the war. And I don't think she is electable, so what's the point of compromising what I believe in? That sure got us all somewhere last time. And the time before. And the time before.

2. John Edwards.
I don't know, he's just so boring! And short.

3. Barack Obama.
I'm surprised to find myself leaning towards him. I'm really not a fan of senators running for President--only the ego of a U.S. Senator could believe that he or she is going to be the first Senator since JFK to be elected--but I find myself getting a little misty-eyed about him sometimes.

4. Bill Richardson
I have an odd affection for him, considering that I suspect he is rather corrupt. But I like that he is governor of a western state, and Latino.

5. Tom Vilsack
Don't know anything, and he hasn't done anything to make me want to.

6. Dennis Kucinich
The thing is, I just really hate Kucinich supporters, on a social level.

7. Joe Biden
I'd rather vote for my box of kleenex.

8. Christopher Dodd
Thanks to my former involvement in Connecticut Democratic party politics, I've been on this guy's mailing list for years. Despite the weekly informational emails from "Chris," I am not impressed.

9. Al Gore
Al Gore did once try to run over one of my friends with a car. And I would not put it past him to mess up another presidential campaign as badly as he did the first time. But it's been a long time since the ugliness of the 2000 Democratic primary, so maybe I could forgive and forget.

Sigh.

The First Punk Rock

2007-02-06T14:01:00.000-08:00

No matter how many times I listen to it, no matter how much I analyze it, the Danse des adolescents will always surprise me.

History and Sonny Til

2007-02-04T03:15:00.000-08:00

Here’s how my dissertation is going: I am currently up to my neck writing the chapter that is on African-American vocal harmony groups. This is the music that will later turn into what we now call doo-wop. It originated from religious sources, like the jubilee quartet tradition, as well as secular groups like the Mills Brothers. Since the period of my dissertation ends in 1954, I am mostly concerned with the early wave of this post-war music, groups like the Orioles and the Clovers. I highly recommend, by the way, Stanley Goosman’s fascinating ethnography of vocal harmony’s roots in urban Baltimore and Washington, DC.

I am running into one philosophical problem, however. That problem is history. History is very important to me. Musicologists have problems with historicizing their research subjects. I can understand this, in many respects. Music of the classical canon is, after all, a living performance tradition. Almost all of us grew up playing and listening to classical music, and when we analyze it, our corporeal interaction with classical music as a living art invariably comes into play. Our own pleasures and entanglements guide our analyses. We talk about “wanting resolution,” as if our own desire for a cadence is a transhistorical desire. We listen quietly, we objectify, we conduct in our heads, we make charts, we label chords. None of it is historicized. I often joke that the closest analogy to musicology in some ways is theology. Many interpret historical texts not to know more about history, but to know how to perform in their current lives.

That’s perfectly fine, as far as it goes. But since I consider myself first and foremost a historian, it doesn’t quite cut it for me. Sure, history is useful for the present. I also consider myself an activist, and I chose my dissertation topic, McCarthyism, for its current political relevance in addition to its historical and musical interest. But it is an important part of my intellectual politics that you take history, and historical people, as seriously as you can, and on their own terms. Many of my colleagues have responded to this issue by analyzing the body transhistorically, assuming that if their own body performs a work a certain way, we can safely presume that an earlier body did as well--a friend of mine likes to write about the heaving bosoms of women playing the piano in Regency England, and one imagines that today bosoms still more or less heave the same way. Other friends of mine have responded by attempting to shape their own physical engagement by using various historical techniques to re-shape their bodily engagement, as for instance taking a historical dance class does, or using historically-informed instruments. All of these techniques sound good to me.

With recorded pop music, however, there is much less corporeal engagement to draw upon. And although you would think that the existence of sound reproduction would make doing history easier, it actually serves to heighten historical difference. To whit: one of the centerpieces of the chapter is a long analysis of the Orioles 1953 hit “Crying in the Chapel.” It was this song that drew me to the repertoire in the first place, it’s a really fabulous track. I bought the Orioles greatest hits last spring, liked a few songs, and cheerfully assumed that they were a great group. Now that I have known their career and music more thoroughly, I still think that.

But I have a problem. Sonny Til, the lead singer, was by all accounts a sexy man. He drove the crowd wild. He supposedly had an amazingly expressive voice, and he knew how to work the stage like nobody else. Panties were flung. Unfortunately, I just can’t hear it. I listen to their tracks over and over again. And I just can’t find him sexy. “Crying in the Chapel,” yes, that is sexy. But that is a late number, when pop music is going through the great cataclysmic shift towards the condition it still lives in today. The Orioles first huge hit was “It’s Too Soon to Know,” from 1948. And man, it is boring. I just cannot hear the sex appeal at all. I try to listen to the song while staring at pictures of the Orioles, and I don't see it. Same with almost all of their music. Turns out that those few tracks I liked idly last spring were the exception, not the rule.

So obviously I am running into the problem of doing history. People are different. Historical people were especially different. It is impossible to accurately feel the same response that those crowds in West Baltimore felt upon hearing this song. This historical difference is always present, but sometimes it is less pronounced. My chapter on John Cage, for instance, was quite easy to historicize. I share many attributes with Cage: we’re both white men, from California, less than heterosexual, and have a taste for avant-garde pretensions. These similarities, plus the fact that I have been engaged with his music and his biography for almost a decade, created a situation where I felt like I could accurately predict Cage’s emotional response to issues—and archival research almost always proved me right.

Sonny Till has neither of these conveniences. I share very little biographical affinity with a black guy from a poor neighborhood of Baltimore—and I have not been engaged with his music for nearly as long. Taking another step back, I guess this is part of the problem of doing a dissertation that looks at a number of disparate genres. Although my tight chronological focus means that I know a tremendous amount of cultural and historical context that I can apply to all of this music, I can’t get to know every single historical subject in my dissertation as well as I would like. Maybe for the book.

The solution? Guess I'll find out. Keep listening to the music, I suppose, and trust all those sources that say Sonny Til was a sexy man. Try to figure out what exactly made him sexy. I need to look at fashion magazines from the period, and the archives of Baltimore's old black newspaper The Afro-American, and old hairstyles, and publicity photos. Listen to as many obscure Baltimore groups as possible to see how the Orioles were different. Dig up accounts of their performances--at what exact point in the song were the panties flung? And then use this all to try and listen to his music differently. We’ll see how it goes.

Saturday Cat Blogging

2007-02-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

I just wanted remind my friends, family, and the blogosphere, that our cat Pablo has the cutest panda bear paws in the world.

Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle

2007-02-01T22:19:00.000-08:00

Phil Ford over at Dial M for Musicology challenged music bloggers to post a list of songs randomly produced by their iPod shuffle, accompanied by explanation and/or apology. Sounds like a fun way to spend the evening, instead of trying to figure out how to teach Webern Op.11 to my students.

I should note, since at the moment the AMS listserv is roiled by a discussion of whether or not popular music scholars are smart enough to teach classical music too, that future employers should be assured that I do own classical music, I just don't put it on my iPod unless I am studying a particular piece and want to make it portable. Otherwise, the clumsy interface for classical music in iTunes drives me nuts, so I don't bother importing them. Hence, this is all pop.

1. Whitney Houston, "I Will Always Love You"

Clearly Dolly does it better.

2. Ella Fitzgerald, "Lush Life"

Again, I much prefer Billy Strayhorn singing this himself, especially when he says he used to "visit all the very gay places." He wasn't kidding. Ella is so innocent.

3. David Garza, "Discoball World"

Ah, David. Pronounced "Dah-veed," I think because he rediscovered his Latino heritage late in life. A little-known singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, who is an object of simultaneous adoration and ridicule amongst my friends. He frequently plays at Largo, a little club near me, and we went through a phase of going to see him whenever he is in town, which is often. After a few weeks, it dissolved into a two-way battle, wherein we would shriek requests from the bar, and he would insult our taste from the stage. Good times.

4. Rancid, "Lock, Step, & Gone"

Okay, I was fourteen years old and living in the East Bay when Let's Go was released, so it is perfectly appropriate for me to own this song, and to have pretended at the time that I remembered the good old days of Operation Ivy. I didn't of course; I was nine when they broke up.

5. 'NSYNC, "It's Gonna Be Me"

To be honest, I was always a Backstreet Boys partisan. I mean, they were real, not like those "NSYNC pretty boys. I only have two or three random 'NSYNC tracks on my iPod, but several entire BB albums. Don't get me started on my Britney fascination.

6. Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"

No need to apologize for this one! Nothing is cooler than Marvin.

7. The Strokes, "The End Has No End"

God, the Strokes really annoy me, with their Drew Barrymore-dating ironic little synth riffs. But I do like this song.

8. The Barbarians, "Moulty"

This is a track from the famous Nuggets compilation that pre-punk Lenny Kaye put together. It's a collection of relatively obscure sixties garage rock, and is highly recommended. When I gave a paper at EMP a few years ago, Lenny Kaye was there, also giving a paper. It was on Bing Crosby and crooning, and it quoted Jeffery Kallberg. That is rock and roll.

9. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Wow, it is too perfect that this song ended up on my shuffle. I first heard this song when I bought Nevermind at about age twelve, on cassette tape. At the time, I was a metal head. So when I put in the tape, I liked the first bit, the intro where the guitar is really loud and distorted. Then it goes into the verse and gets kind of quiet. Being a metal head who had never heard of the Pixies, I thought that was wimpy, pushed stop, threw the tape somewhere, and didn't listen to it again for several months. Then it became my favorite song of all time.

10. The Foundations, "Build Me Up Buttercup"

I often use this song in teaching, just because it kind of plays with your expectations of what it means to sound "black." First, the students think it is a Motown song, or a Motown-style song by a black group. Then I tell them that the Foundations are actually British. They all go "whoa." And then I remind them that not all British people are white, and the Foundations were an interracial group made up of white and Afro-Caribbean Brits. They all go "whoa" again. And that's education.

Bad Musicologist

2007-02-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

Menotti was still alive? Who knew?!

That Special Dissertation

2007-01-31T11:14:00.000-08:00

When I was little, and pictured myself writing my dissertation, I somehow had this image of the experience as being special, somehow. Like, I would have an office where I would have all my notes and books set up. And maybe a bulletin board where I would pin up index cards to organize things. Because I would have spent years doing research that would be carefully catalogued away in file cabinets. It certainly wouldn't be like writing a seminar paper, where you do just enough research to get by and hash out a few thousand words on some random subject by the seat of your pants.

Well, you know what? Writing a dissertation is not special. An office? Who was I kidding, graduate students don't have offices! I write at my desk crowded next to my bed at home, the same spot where I have written dozens of seminar papers, exam answers, and blog posts. And carefully assembling research and organizing it all beautifully? Hah! I'm just sitting down and typing it all out the best I can. Granted I've done a lot more research on this topic than on anything else I've ever written on, but still, I feel like at any moment my brain is going to get tired of holding all this information, and stop working.

So, to summarize: writing a dissertation? Not that special. Not unpleasant, but not special.

Don't Mess With Texas

2007-01-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

Alright, the self-pity is over, and never to be spoken of again. I am back in the game. There are errands to be run, books to be read, tasks to be realized, new dissertation chapters to be wrought.

But first a request in the comments to my previous self-pitying post, from the lovely chelsea girl. She asks, in the context of pairing poems with pop songs for an English lit class, if there are any good songs in which a woman kills her husband. Another commenter has already suggested Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," which is an interesting choice. I had always assumed it was about a child abuse victim killing her father, but re-listening to it I realize that it is unclear who Janie actually kills--it could very well be that her abused childhood causes her to kill some (slightly) more innocent victim.

My first offhand suggestion? The Dixie Chick's classic "Goodbye Earl," with its fabulous chorus:

Goodbye Earl
Those black-eyed peas
They tasted all right to me Earl
You're feeling weak
Why don't you lay down
and sleep Earl
Ain't it dark
Wrapped up in that tarp Earl

Off topic: I first heard this song in college, and it was played to me by my partner's aunt. This lady is a very nice woman, but has quite conservative politics--she certainly would be proud to say that Bush is from her state, if he was, which he isn't. And I think she would reject the label feminist as well. But man, she loved this song, and the message of empowerment it gave. When Natalie Maines gets to the point where snarls, "Earl had to die!" she would sing along at the top of her lungs, and smirk at her husband.

But does anybody else have any suggestions for woman-on-man uxoricide in popular music?

Knockin' on Heaven's Door

2007-01-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

I have been dying since Sunday. The flu, maybe just some little virus, who knows. Mary got it first, then both my roommate and I succumbed, so it is clearly contagious--keep your distance, people. The first three days were spent feverish and comatose in bed, unable to move. Tuesday I dragged my laptop into my bed so that I could peck out, one painful word at a time, an abstract to submit to a conference. Wednesday, the fever broke, the congestion arrived. Today, I managed to go to school and drag myself through a few official duties. Tomorrow I have to teach for an hour, and then I can go home and sleep until Tuesday.

Blegh. I have not been this sick since...I don't remember when. Blegh.

The Universe Runs Amok

2007-01-14T16:42:00.000-08:00

One of the chapters of my dissertation is essentially about the concept of universality: there are many things in life that are so entrenched in people's belief systems that we assume their universality. The classic example, for instance, is the racial category "white." Whiteness is always assumed. When "we" see a white man on the street (and by we, I mostly mean white people, but the dominance of this ideology is such that this is not guaranteed) we might say to a friend, "There is a man." When "we" see a black man on the street, we are likely to say, "there is a black man." This presumption of universality is a classic way of maintaining power. Richard Taruskin likes to point out that when Germans wrote German music, it was called romanticism, but when Czechs wrote music, it was called nationalism. The most popular music on the charts is always called pop music, no matter what it sounds like, whereas all of the other music charts are still basically defined by the minority communities who listen to it: Country (rural white folk), R&B (originally called "Race music" by Billboard), and so on. My chapter looks at this concept at one particular moment: in pop music right after World War II, the world of people like Patti Page, Jo Stafford, Vera Lynn, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and so on. As I have blogged before, this music was so universalized, it did not even have a name. And it was played just as Joseph McCarthy was using that same power of universality to fictionalize a new vision of the United States, a tabula rasa from which was wiped any people who were not "everyday Americans." Musicologists call this "covert and casual values," the rest of the academic world calls it hegemony.

I was reminded of this by an article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times about the Bush Administration's recent about-face in administering the Iraq colony. Like many, I have grown disillusioned over the past six years of war, and often don't take the time to stay informed about the mundane details of the occupation. Randomly, however, the new general in charge of coalition forces in Iraq is a cousin of mine (just by marriage, and I don't think we've ever met, but still) so I gave the article a read.

There are a lot of shocking things about what is happening in Iraq. But this article in particular highlighted the fact that our nation is still under the sway of Cold War ideologies. And the two biggest keywords are the post-WII concepts of "democracy" and "capitalism."

Now neither capitalism nor democracy is a natural thing. Neither systems have existed forever, and neither will continue to do so for all future. As a good leftie I am obviously a fan of the latter, suspicious of the first. But I do at least recognize that these are simply ideologies, and not realities. They are culturally produced. If you were to take a town in, say, feudal England, and tell the inhabitants that there are no longer any feudal loyalties, you would not suddenly have a democratic society or a capitalist economy. Ideologies take time to worm themselves into people; after all Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and I don't think capitalism became completely universalized in this country until the Clinton administration. (Thanks, Bill.) And the United States still does not give the vote to all of its citizens, nor is its leader elected democratically.

And how do these entrenched ideologies work in the world at large? One of the stories this article tells is of the state-run factories in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Iraq was, after all, a basically national-socialist state, and the economy was heavily controlled by the government. When the United States occupied the country, they closed down all institutions run by the government, including the factories. This of course left thousands unemployed. The article tells the story of an American named Timothy Carney who was sent to Iraq to run the "Ministry of Mines and Materials." Quite reasonably, he assumed that it would be a good idea to repair and reopen these factories. Unemployed and impoverished Iraqis=badness.

But no, the American authorities in Baghdad didn't allow it. Because, although supposedly we were invading Iraq to install Ideology #1 (democracy), we were more covertly there to install Ideology #2 (capitalism). And so, no government money was going to be used on these factories. Instead, these spectacularly hubristic Americans assumed that "private investors" would buy the plants, repair them, and hire workers. Of course, there would be a gap in which there would be higher unemployment, but that magical invisible hand of Adam Smith would reach down from on high and set things straight before long. Because, after all, capitalism is natural, and inevitable.

Well, guess what. It wasn't. Six years later, the factories are still closed, unemployment and poverty have reached untenable levels, and violence has inevitably skyrocketed accordingly. There is neither democracy, nor capitalism, nor even everyday safety. 14th century feudalism would be better than this. Our nation's belief in the universality of our ideologies has amazingly managed to beat Saddam at his own game. Saddam tried so hard to run his country into the ground, but it took us, with our democracy and our capitalism, to really do the job properly.

I Am Sitting in a Classroom

2007-01-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about teaching music is the chance to play great music for students. That sounds obvious, but it really is a special thing. Particularly in a large public university like mine, where the undergraduate students have had their lives so thoroughly instrumentally-rationalized for the past 18 years, and where even the music majors are on a frantic pace to earn credits, get good grades, accomplish the right extra-curricular activities, and do the right internships, particularly in this situation I love making my students sit still for a moment to listen to music. It's not like a lecture, there is no note-taking. It's not a film, which tends to zonk them into television-viewing mode. It is one of the few times in their hectic lives when they have to plop down, be quiet, and be mindful.

The professor I am currently TAing for values this as well, and has no problem with using copious amounts of class time just for listening. The entire Tristan Prelude? Sure. A few scenes from Boris Gudonov? Yes!

But I just want to briefly pay tribute to the very first music class I ever took in college, where I learned the value of listening carefully and quietly to music. I had been a musician in high school, but not a very good one, and when I went off to college I didn't really intend on studying music. History, maybe, or Political Science. But I had an spare slot in my schedule, after French II, History 201 ("Medieval Europe"), and a special freshman seminar in early Arthurian literature. So on a whim, I registered for a class called "Introduction to Experimental Music." It seemed like it might add some pleasant variety to my life.

The first day of class, I nervously made my way to a cavernous dungeon of a classroom, a former recording studio buried several stories underground. It was a large class, probably about a hundred people. The professor was an elderly man with a bushy moustache and a pronounced stutter. His name was Alvin Lucier, and although I had never heard of him, when I flipped through our textbook--a xeroxed copy of Michael Nyman's then-out-of-print Experimental Music--I saw that he was mentioned frequently in the text as an important composer. It was a great class, and his stutter soon became permanently impressed in our brains. Like most speech impediments, it seemed to get worse when he had to speak loudly, or to a large crowd, and especially when words began with the letters "r" or "s." He never talked about it, though, and we soon got used to the long pauses and quirky rhythm the stutter gave his lecturing.

Fairly early on, Lucier played for us his piece for which he is most famous: I Am Sitting in a Room. Many of my readers will know it, but some won't, so let me describe it. It is a tape piece, and starts with Lucier sitting in his apartment in Middletown, recording himself speaking this text:

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration as a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

And that's exactly what he does. This text recorded, he then plays the recording out loud, and with another tape machine recorded the sound of the text being played in the room. Rinse, wash, repeat. As he records, plays, and records, certain frequencies of the recording begin to be absorbed by his room, and others are amplified. By the end of the forty-five minutes, you can no longer make out what he is saying, and you are left only with a beautiful wash of ringing sound. You can listen to the original fifteen minute recording from 1969here.

Like any piece Alvin has ever done, it was a very conceptually clear work. He picks a process, and sticks to it. But also like all of his works, there is a surprising amount of hermeneutic interest. What could be dry, almost scientific music, actually contains within it multitudes of personal meanings. For even when recording himself speak, Lucier stutters--the "r" of the word "rhythm" is particularly obvious, and you can hear him leaning heavily on several other words. And so this piece of music is not only about demonstrating the physical properties of the room, as he says, but also smoothing out his speech. And although one critic has read this as his attempt to consign himself to "sonic oblivion," it was always clear to me that for Lucier himself it was nothing of the sort. I still remember him standing in front of the classroom, with the lights turned down low, and playing us the entire 1980 recording. He looked so proud. He had never spoken to us about his stutter, and he didn't need to. We could hear it, and for Lucier just hearing was the important thing. And once you just heard his stutter as a sound, you realize that it can sound beautiful. But what I like even more about Lucier's music, more than Cage's rather stern formalism, is that the lesson to be drawn is not that all sounds are beautiful. Lucier was proud to have created these beautiful sounds with his own voice. Sounds are beautiful because they involve people. I think that is the important lesson I learned in that class.

In the craziness of my first semester of college, his stutter soon became a comforting presence, a reminder that for twice a week, for one and a half hours, I could sit quietly in his dimly lit classroom and just listen to sounds. I learned a lot about music history in that class; nine years later I still occasionally consult my notes. But as a teacher, I always hope to reproduce that moment where we can also sit quietly and listen to one another.

Writing by the Numbers

2007-01-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a nice long holiday break, but now it's time to get serious. The deadline for applications for a Very Important Fellowship are next week, as is the deadline for abstracts for a Very Important Conference. This fellowship application has necessitated the writing from scratch of yet another version of my dissertation proposal. The original was 25 pages, another fellowship required 5 pages, and this one requires 12-15. I love this business we call academia.

Want to know some statistics about the dissertation chapter I am sending in?

Words: 18389
Characters: 96687
Paragraphs: 211
Sentences: 786

On average, I have 4.6 sentences per paragraph, 23 words per sentence, and 5.1 characters per word. Plus, Microsoft Word thinks that my chapter is at a 12th grade reading level. I'm not sure what to make of that. I'm not going to tell you what percentage of my sentences are in what the program thinks is a passive voice, because that would be showing weakness.

It is a scary thought that in writing this one chapter, I have pressed the keys on my keyboard almost 100,000 times.

I Miss This Cat

2007-01-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

His name is Snowy, and he belongs to Mary's stepmother. He is a Himalayan Persian, and he is spectacular.

Go Team

2007-01-07T19:36:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of my department. I only wish I could say I took the course, but unfortunately I just audited it last quarter.

I will say, obviously nobody listens to crackpots like the Young American Foundation when they issue press releases like this, but I am disappointed that the Los Angeles Times chose to publish this op-ed in favor of the list. My favorite line is when the unfortunate author ("Charlotte Allen, author of The Search for the Historical Jesus") attempts to define what this crazy "queer musicology" is: "a new field dating from the 1990s based in part on the idea that if you're gay, then music by gay composers such as Benjamin Britten will sound different to you than it would if you were straight." Yup. That's exactly what we do. I'm just going to just save time and print that on my future syllabus.

Never fear, Ms. Allen, you have your friends in the academy. Really, it's a good thing, all of this. Soon I can write the sequel to my dissertation, "Music and McCarthyism 2: This Time We Mean It, Godless Pinkos."

Morty, oh Morty

2007-01-02T20:29:00.000-08:00

Morton Feldman is so hard to write about. I've managed to avoid writing about him with any seriousness thus far. I've done John Cage to death, I've done Earle Brown in some detail, I've spent some quality time in the David Tudor papers, and if pressed to say something intelligent about Christian Wolff I could definitely pull through. But Morty? Luckily, I have not had a gun pressed to my forehead with the knowledge that if I simply talked about Feldman's length and quietude I would be shot. But it is going to happen some day. My grand plan is to write a book some day about the New York School (my advisor loves it when I talk about my next book instead of my current dissertation), and so I'm just not going to be able to avoid it.

It's not that I don't like him. I love him. I saw Yuri Bashmet play The Viola in My Life with the San Francisco Symphony when I was in high school, and even at that early age, barely having heard of John Cage, I knew it to be beautiful music. When my professor--the estimable Alvin Lucier-- played us Two Pianos in the first music class I took in college, I was spellbound, and checked the score out of the library to ponder. As I have blogged before, I occasionally put on the epic Flux recording of String Quartet No. 2 for solace in times of blustery despair. Last summer I read his collected essays, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, and still quote its clever lines left and right. Like this one: "Impressionism isn't painting, it is an idea about painting." I just wrote that from memory. I consider Feldman to be the only true postmodernist of the New York School. 'Cause as Gayatri Spivak says--and here I also quote from memory, but probably in error--postmodernism is the result of living under postmodernity. I read that to say you can't adopt postmodernism, you've got to be born under it, and breath it out instinctively.

...I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe and also that, just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don't understand a word you're saying." And so, in a very weak voice, I answered John, "I don't know how I made it." The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and, with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn't that marvelous. Isn't that wonderful. It's so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

I love John Cage the squealing monkey. But anyways, okay, so Morton Feldman is great. No question there. But if you believe in writing in specific and communicable detail about what makes a piece of music great, we obviously can't stop there. And I have no idea how to. How do you deal with his music with any specificity? There is not much in the way of good writing to turn to. Kyle Gann just did a post that is a great example of how to do it--he notices that Feldman tends to change his textures more or less page by page. Obviously the question is what next to do with that observation, but with Feldman's all-too-mystic music I think it is crucial to start with this sort of demystifying maneuver.

A New Year

2007-01-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

I think I managed to survive New Year's Eve without embarrassing myself, for once. I hope this bodes well for an excellent 2007; I know I'm looking forward to it!

Resolutions:

1. Do good things.
2. Don't do bad things.
3. Pay bills on time.

Dreamgirls

2006-12-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

How could a musicologist not like this movie?

Well, there is one reason not to: jealousy. I've taught and TAed a lot of popular music in the past few years. In our classes we tend to focus a lot on the black/white color line. And this being a sensitive issue, we go to great trouble to present issues that get at the heart of this divide in particularly interesting and complicated ways. For instance, the phenomenon of cover songs in the fifties, or the dueling aesthetics of Motown and Stax in the sixties. Both of these issues show how complicated it is to have a "black" or a "white" aesthetic in popular music, and how such aesthetics are always mediated by market forces, by politics, and by individual personalities.

We go to great lengths to teach our students these issues. We spend a lot of classroom time and energy on them. And then comes along a movie that not only teaches all this basically as well as we do, but succinctly, and with style. Not unproblematically, of course, but just because the movie makes its own biases clear--soul music/black authenticity good, disco music/white inauthenticity bad--it nevertheless presents the issues in a fairly reasoned manner. I can tell that for the rest of my life I'm going to be referring to Dreamgirls in class, and that makes me jealous.

There is a lot more to be said about this movie. I really enjoyed it, although it was hard to turn off my musicological brain at times (for a movie that hates disco, they sure wrote a lot of faux Motown numbers with that patented disco accented riding hi-hat beat). But I want to point out one more thing, in addition to my own consuming jealousy. The truly tragic figure in this movie is not Jennifer Hudson's character, but Beyoncé, who plays the faux Diana Ross character. I've long claimed that Beyoncé is the Diana Ross of her generation. Like Diana, she doesn't have a strong voice. It is not that it is an unpleasant voice, but it is not particularly forceful in the way that the American public likes its black women singers. It wasn't a coincidence that her manager parents set her up in a girl group to start off her career; her voice was not strong enough to stand on its own, and the close harmony singing of Destiny's Child was necessary to provide her with vocal support. Even when she went solo, Beyoncé's producers overdubbed, reverbed, digitally altered, and otherwise provided the support necessary. Her first single sounded just like Destiny's Child, except with three digital Beyoncés instead of one Beyoncé and two friends.

Diana Ross, of course, was much the same story. As the movie shows, she had a light and somewhat colorless voice. Berry Gordy's great innovation was not just to put her as the front singer of the Supremes, but also to write music that pitched her voice unnaturally low. If you listen to some of the Supremes/Primettes early music, you can hear her singing in her original high pitched voice, and it is not particularly attractive. Pitched low, however, her voice became sultry. Recall "Where Did Our Love Go," for example, their first big HDH hit. Add in great production and the best backing band in the world, and you don't even notice that her voice isn't doing much.

So that's the history of Diana Ross's voice, courtesy of a class on Motown I TAed last year. The tragic thing about Dreamgirls is that it forces Beyoncé to perform Diana Ross's weaknesses while inhabiting a body with the same weakness. And the movie goes to great lengths not only to show that Effie White is a better singer than Deena Jones, but that Jennifer Hudson is a better singer than Beyoncé Knowles. I don't know if that was what Beyoncé was expecting out of making this movie. Poor woman.

But go see it! Alex Ross approves.

December 25th, jet lagged

2006-12-24T23:11:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, y'all.

Scrooged

2006-12-23T10:57:00.000-08:00

Ashland has an amazing theater scene. You've of course got the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is one of the great American regional theaters. OSF has three theaters which together produce 750 showings of 11 different plays each year. But OSF is not the only game in town. There is the Oregon Cabaret theater, the Camelot Theater Company, Oregon StageWorks, and then a well-respected theater department at Southern Oregon University. Hey, if Terry Teachout loves this town, how couldn't you?

I say all of this because even in a great theater scene, things fall between the cracks. And last night I saw one of the most dreadful theatrical spectacles I have ever seen. It was a musical version of A Christmas Carol, and let's just say that the second act kicked off with a Cratchett family rap. You know, Tiny Tim, played by a precocious nine year old choir boy, started things off by tapping his crutches to a "hip hop beat", and then one by one each Cratchett family member took his or her turn rapping about Christmas spirit. All completely unironically. The music was by the notorious choral arranger Kirby Shaw, the book by his wife, and apparently it was a world premiere. I wonder what the word is for the last time a work gets produced? World Conclusion? World Finale? World Demise?

Off to DC tomorrow. Cross your fingers for a fog-less Medford and a snow-less Salt Lake City.

Update: Fog in Medford. Flight delayed four hours. Argh.

Update too: After being on hold for an hour, managed to get a later flight to Dulles. Arrived in DC forty-five minutes before Christmas!

Ode to the Hot Tub

2006-12-20T20:52:00.000-08:00

What did I do this evening? Let me tell you. It's going to be fascinating.

My parents' new house has a hot tub. Although they are not necessarily the sort of people you would expect to have a hot tub, they have had actually had two, out of the five houses they have owned. When I was born, they lived in a little cottage in Mill Valley, Marin, down the street from a redwood grove. My mother commuted to work in the City via the Sausalito ferry. Side note: Apparently there was a pretty swinging singles scene on the Sausalito ferry back in the day. The boat had a bar, and the Friday evening commute could get pretty raucous. Rumor has it that my uncle, who lived on a houseboat at the time, used to ride back and forth several times in one evening. But that's completely unsubstantiated.

Anyways, I think it was basically a zoning requirement that little cottages in Marin in the seventies had to have a hot tub. So my parents had the redwood barrel pictured below. As you can see, I enjoyed hot tubs from an early age.

I still love hot tubs. I know, who doesn't? But I really like hot tubs. I think partly it is because I am rather tall, and so there are few bathtubs out there in which I comfortably fit. Denied the everyday pleasure of immersion in hot water, it becomes a rare treat when I find a body of water small enough to heat up, but large enough to fit me. I could spend hours in a hot tub, staring into space, letting my brain cells slowly leech away into the water.

Unfortunately, my parents moved out of this house when I was very young, and I was without hot tub for many years. These were rough years in the hot tub-less wilderness. When my parents moved to Oregon a few years ago, however, the new house they bought, otherwise fairly staid, came with a large and luxurious hot tub installed in the back yard. I wasn't there when they moved in, but apparently my sister, who shares my love of the hot tub, got it up and running within minutes of arrival.

It's very cold in southern Oregon right now, with highs barely breaking 32 degrees. We've been trying to get the hot tub working all week, but it appeared to be too cold for the cranky propane heater to turn on. Yesterday, though, my dad finally got it running, and by this evening it had finally worked its way up to an appropriate temperature. So tonight, when my parents were taking the puppy to his weekly puppy class, I finally made it out for my annual soak. As I said, it's quite cold, about 29 degrees when I ventured outside. So I scampered out in a bathrobe, propped the cover up against a bush for a makeshift privacy screen--to wear a swim suit is not exactly in keeping with the hot tub spirit--and started the process of lowering myself into the scalding water. Despite my love of hot tubs, I am not very good about immersing myself in water of extreme temperature, either hot or cold. So it was a tenuous few minutes where I was perched on the side of the tub, my lower half in 100 degree water, my upper half in below freezing air.

But I eventually made it all the way in. And it felt wonderful. I think I might be ready to get back to writing my dissertation now.

Oregoniana

2006-12-17T10:05:00.000-08:00

With apologies to my friend and Oregonian apologist Regarding, want to hear a story that will make us Californians feel a little better about our state government?

Jackson County, Oregon, where my parents live, is about to shut down all of its public libraries. Not trim staff, not close branches, but close down completely in March. How did this happen?

1. The state of Oregon has no sales tax.
2. 55 percent of the land in the state of Oregon is owned by the federal government, which does not pay property taxes.
3. All that federal land comes mostly in the form of National Forests.
4. Back in the day, the Feds used to give local counties in Oregon a percentage of the money made from timber in those forests.
5. There is no longer a timber industry.
6. After the collapse of the timber industry, the Federal Government agreed to still give Oregon counties subsidies. This money was pretty substantial--$23 million to Jackson County last year, as I understand it.
7. What with the Republicans, and the war, and the general federal desire to end subsidies to industries without powerful lobbies, these subsidies are ending next year. (Hey, somebody has to pay the Midwest to grow corn!)
8. Suddenly, Jackson County has $23 million less than it used to. Does it cut the Sheriff's department, or the public libraries?
9. In anticipation of this problem, the county votes on a parcel tax which would provide money to continue funding the library system at its current level. This tax was rejected by 60% of the voters.
10. So that's it. No more public libraries in the county. My mother is a volunteer at the Ashland library, a beautiful Beaux Art facility with a brand new addition. In fact, a recent county bond measure had actually built a bunch of new library facilities throughout the county, providing community spaces and information access to a very rural and working-class part of the state. All of this is going to be gone in March.

The Archive and the Repertoire

2006-12-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, thanks to the munificence of Jewel Dakini, Mary and I were treated to a free ticket to see Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra play through three Mozart piano concertos: 16, 18, and 25. It's part of their Mozart year effort to play all 23 piano concertos, come hell or high water. And I have to say, it tends towards the former. Kahane is an amazing performer, of course, and it is a good ensemble. There is nobody I would rather see run though all 23 concertos. But... number 16? I had never heard, or heard of, this one before. Of course, I am the furthest thing removed from a Mozart person, so that's not saying so much. But looking through the Mozart books I happen to have at hand, it seems I am not alone. Charles Rosen tells us that it "is difficult for many listeners to appreciate...this is not the Mozart we love." Neal Zaslaw's Compleat Mozart mainly focuses on the fact that it was published in his lifetime, and an annotated copy he sent to Nannerl has one of the few written-out examples of Mozart's own ornamentation. Maynard Solomon just tells us that it was one a series he composed to bring in some money in 1784. From hearing it once, I can tell you it is a pretty dull piece of music.

So, in other words, there doesn't seem to be a lot of reasons to play this piece. I know, I know, that's musicological hearsay. But I think that's the thing--is there a musical reason to perform this? Or is it simply necessary to play it because it completes the set? Do we play because we enjoy playing it, or listening to it? Or do we play it simply to reaffirm the canon in the most extreme sense: not only is it only played because Mozart wrote it, but furthermore we only play it because it is one of his numbered piano concertos. If it was not by Mozart, and if it was one of his piano/orchestra pieces not given an official number, we'd never have to hear it again.

Last spring I was in a seminar which was lucky enough to have Diana Taylor of NYU come give a guest presentation. Taylor's book The Archive and Repertoire has caused many waves in the field of performance studies. Its basic idea is that performance, defined broadly, is an important repertoire of knowledge and memory. Traditional histories are defined by the static existence of the archive, the official history of events and actions. The idea of an embodied repertoire gives a powerful new voice to alternative histories.

At her presentation at my seminar, Taylor was asked why she chose the term "repertoire." She replied that it seemed to imply a sense of flexible possibilities, as in the OED definition "the entire range of skills or aptitudes or devices used in a particular field or occupation." In conversation afterwards, I pointed out that in the world of classical music, repertoire has a much different meaning. It refers to a set of musical works: either of a certain kind ("the nineteenth-century symphonic repertoire") or those pieces a performer is able to play ("My repertoire includes the Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Berg violin concertos"). There is a similarity between Taylor and Classical Music's usages, in that it refers to a set of skills of a sort. But in classical music those skills are not flexible tools, they are skills restricted to performing a very specific piece of music. In fact, in the first sense of repertoire used by classical music, as a set of works of a certain kind, there aren't any human performers anymore: the repertoire is not embodied skills, but abstract musical works. Whereas Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire is about listening to an alternative set of knowledge, the classical music sense of repertoire is about preserving the archive--those canonical works that "we" have ideologically chosen over the past several centuries, at the expense of other histories and people.

Why do we play Mozart's 16th Piano Concerto? Is it for the archive, or the repertoire?

On Domesticity

2006-12-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

My partner flew in from Barnet last Monday. Her last rotation of the year--Emergency Critical Care--is over, and for the next two months she is supposed to be doing a series of short internships at veterinary clinics, as well finishing up her research project on equine physiotherapy. These two weeks she is working at TLC, the veterinary clinic of choice for Los Angeles musicologists.

I've meanwhile been finishing up the quarter--running review sessions, proctoring a final, lots of grading, and tying up the usual loose ends. Ordinary, but also unusual. For the first time in a long time, Mary and I are living and working together. This has rarely been the case over the past five years. We have spent a fair amount of time together, of course, but necessarily this time together occurs when one of us is on vacation. I'll visit her in Barnet, and hang around town while she is off fixing animals. She'll visit me here in Los Angeles, and hang around while I torture undergraduates and go to my own classes. So as odd as it seems, it is actually quite nice, and quite special, to be living and working together. She goes to work, I go to school, and we come home at the same time and cook dinner. Weekends off are actually weekends off, and there is nothing wrong with lazing around and relaxing in the evening.

So this is domesticity, and I like it a lot.

Poetry Friday

2006-12-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I have been in the mood for the metaphysics. So with a hearty exhortation for everyone to go read Richard Rambuss's Closet Devotions, I present to you some John Donne to celebrate the last day of the quarter, when we all feel a bit battered indeed.

Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart (c.1635)

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Graduate Students and Service

2006-12-06T09:47:00.000-08:00

There has been a flurry of discussion on academic blogs these past few days about the subject of academic meetings: how burdensome are they actually for faculty? How does one run a good meeting? How much does service count for tenure? Why do some faculty end up with more meetings than others? And so on.

I haven't yet seen any graduate students chime in on this, so I thought I would add my two cents. We all know that most doctoral programs do a much better job of training the research, rather than the teaching, side of being an academic. Yet, from what I gather from this discussion and from my own professors' whining, service seems to make up a huge part of the daily life of being an academic. But that is one skill that is almost completely absent from our training. When does a graduate student learn how to behave at a meeting? To write a report? To lead a meeting? And probably most importantly, when do we learn how to juggle these three simultaneous academic roles, rather than just the two we juggle now?

In my program, we have a few opportunities for graduate students to develop service skills. There is a student representative to the faculty who "gets" to sit in on faculty meetings every two weeks. There is a small group of 2-3 grad students who administer a visiting speaker series. A few brave students have volunteered to serve on university-wide committees, or have taken leadership roles in our TA union. (Don't forget to vote to authorize strikes this week, kids!) And probably most significantly, our department sponsors an online journal, completely run by graduate students. This last opportunity is probably the closest experience to actually being an academic in a functioning department. We have weekly meetings, there are tasks to be accomplished outside of those meetings, and there are opportunities for leadership. I'm currently one of the editors of the journal, and although sometimes the whole thing seems awfully silly and amateur, it's easy to remind myself that learning to keep a meeting on track (I find Dean Dad's advice very useful), to delegate responsibilities, and to be a responsible adult about the whole thing are all skills I need to develop if I want to have a happy academic life.

But doing any of these service tasks, as a graduate student, requires a fair amount of initiative. It's certainly not a requirement of the program, and although there is some mild pressure to help the department out when things need doing, it's hard to fault people for not volunteering to spend their busy time doing often-pointless work. I don't really want my program to require service for graduate students, 'cause that seems like it could be a disaster. But it is something I think we grad students need to keep in mind--come real life, we're going to be thrust into the world of service, and that's something we need to prepare for as much as research and teaching.

1,000 Words on Marie Antoinette

2006-12-02T21:43:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Sofia Coppola's movies, so I'm surprised at myself that it took this long to go see her latest, Marie Antoinette. I waited too long, it turns out, so I had to go see it at a late-run showing at the Laemmle Sunset. Now, I like this theater a lot. It does very adventurous programming, has a student discount, and the staff are friendly. But the seats, man, the seats! My long legs don't quite fit in the space allotted, and I always spend the whole movie squirming around trying to get comfortable.

So, the movie. Every movie by Ms. Coppola has the same basic story arch: we know from the very beginning that things will end in tragedy. In The Virgin Suicides it's the titular death of all the sisters. In Lost in Translation it's knowing that ultimately Bill Murray will have to leave Japan and Scarlett Johansson. In Marie Antoinette...well, we all know what happens to her. But in each case, the inevitable tragedy is delayed for the entire movie. When it finally comes, it seems sudden and unprepared, despite the fact that you've been lolling around for two hours waiting for it. It reminds me of the end of Charles Ives's first symphony. By the end of the fourth movement, you've been pushed and buffeted by multiple layers of dissonant and seemingly unrelated music, constantly being teased as if the end is near. On the very last page of the score, the pace is picking up yet again, and you're sure that the thing is going to end any moment. And then you get this gigantic cadence (overlaid with a trumpet playing "Reveille", because, you know, it is Ives after all) and you just know the end will be any moment now. And then Ives does indeed end it, but with a gigantic cluster chord played at fortissimo by the entire orchestra, a chord that contains 11 notes--every single possible chromatic note, that is, except the B flat which would resolve the cadence. The piece has indeed ended, but it doesn't feel good. When the mob storms Versailles in Marie Antoinette, you obviously knew it was coming, but this fulfillment of an expectation doesn't feel good.

Another classic Sofia device is tension between extreme presence and absence. Her movies are full of sensory overload. The colors are vivid, the music loud. And yet, in each movie, there is some crucial missing element. In Lost in Translation, this was the famous whispered dialogue at the very end--Bill Murray leans in to whisper something in Scarlett Johansson's ear. It's clearly something important to the narrative, but it's a busy Tokyo street and you can't hear them. In Marie Antoinette, it's the sun. At several key moments in the movie, Kirsten Dunst watches the sun rise. In each moment, the sun is always just outside the frame. All we see are reflections--on water, on glass, on her face. There's nothing so iconographic as the sun, and it is hard to imagine any filmmaker, painter, or photographer composing a frame of sunrise that did not put the sun at the very center. In Marie Antoinette, having been bombarded with sensory overload for two hours, you feel this absence more strongly than almost anything else.

I don't know much about film studies, but I imagine it would be pretty easy to do a feminist post-structuralist reading of Coppola's work. You've got the non-traditional narratography, the privileging of surface experience over interior depth, the representations of consumerism that lies somewhere between critique and celebration. These films are nothing if not full of jouissance. If I might pull out one more annoying musicological metaphor, however, there are elements of this film that make me think of the arguments my advisor makes in his book on minimalism. Many feminist critics have celebrated the jouissance of minimalist music, its ability resist a heterosexual erotics of music--rather than Beethoven making you work really hard for an hour before finally giving you release at the end, minimalism just gives you endless bliss. That's the standard reading. My advisor, however, points out that a lot of minimalist music does actually have plenty of discrete moments of release. To be blunt, it's not, in other words, that minimalism has no orgasm or one long sustained one, but that often it has dozens of small ones.

I bring this up because in Marie Antoinette, Coppola does not actually just sit back and let the pretty colors and loud music wash over you. Although I would probably need to see it again, I do sense a structure in this movie that is just as top-down, push-the-audience-around as Beethoven. It just uses the non-traditional elements I outlined above to do so. I'm thinking in particular of the mob scene at Versailles. For the entire movie we've been treated to this very loud soundtrack that combines late 70's and early 80's new wave and punk rock with fairly authentic mid-18th century music, like Rameau. The music is a crucial part of telling you what to think, and with the opulent sets and costumes forms the major part of the sensory overload. That said, the loudest noise of the movie is actually the sound of the mob when Kirsten Dunst opens up the door on her balcony. The sound of the crowd is significantly louder than the already-loud music we've been listening to. It was a shocking moment, and one that was not arrived at by way of the plot--the mob came hours ago, and it is no secret what is going to happen. And the main visual imagery is another absence--for several shots, the camera focuses on specific individuals in the mob, but never their faces, just the backs of their heads. Coppola is using the presence vs. absence tension to shock us. We're being manipulated, but not in a traditional movie way.

I have to say, I like it.

Humanities R Us

2006-12-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

Today is the big UCLA vs. USC football game, and my undergraduates are all a-twizzle. There are pep rallies, bonfires, even a vigil to protect the campus mascot from dastardly deeds. A number of my students are in the marching band, so they are all out in Pasadena today, performing great feats of lung-foot coordination and some milder feats of musicianship. I wish them well. **

Speaking of these two august institutions, there was an interesting story in the current LA Weekly by Justin Clark about their academic rivalry. Predictably, the two schools are constantly poaching professors from one another; in one incident, USC even tried to hire away five members of the UCLA linguistics department in one fell swoop. A lot of the competition has to do with USC's attempt to rehabilitate its academic reputation as the former University of Spoiled Children my Stanford alumni parents always warned me about. In the past few years, USC has gone from #46 to #27 in the rankings, almost tied with UCLA, and presumably they have their competitive eye on the NoCal schools as well.

Most interesting, however, is the the shifting status of the politics of this rivalry. Back in the 1960s, there was a stark difference between the two campuses: USC watched the growing "disintegration" of its urban neighborhood--and by "disintegration", we actually should read "integration"--with suspicion and hostility, seriously considering a move to join Pepperdine up in Malibu. UCLA, meanwhile, became a hotbed of student activism thanks to a fairly liberal school administration.

Forty years later, though, things have changed: USC has invested heavily in its surrounding neighborhoods, and has come to view its urban location as a major draw. UCLA, thanks to Proposition 209 and the gradual depoliticization of the UC system as a whole, has become increasingly less diverse: enrollment of black students is down to offensive levels, the student government is now controlled by an conservative (and explicitly white) slate, and Westwood is now a bland marketplace of chain stores and dull restaurants. This change, of course, mirrors many larger changes in American politics over the last forty years. Once upon a time, conservative power rested in the Republican "old money" WASP areas of Pasadena and Downtown--USC territory--whereas the largely Jewish and Hollywood-funded Westside was Democratic and liberal--UCLA. That distinction is pretty much gone nowadays, replaced by much more fragmentary and temporary political alliances. UCLA's enclave amongst the ritzy towns of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air increasingly has the feel of a gated community, while USC's urban location allows it to engage with the outside world on an ongoing basis. Obviously there are many complicating factors, and it will take a long time for public perception to catch up. But I think we've only seen the beginning.

Anyways, the one thing this article doesn't talk about it is how central the humanities are to some of these academic and political rivalries. USC has for the past few years been making a point to hire a broad range of very exciting humanistic scholars--just since I came to town, they've hired Judith Halberstam, Josh Kun, Alice Echols, Karen Tongson, and Bruce Smith. More that I'm probably forgetting about, or haven't heard about. UCLA? Not so much. Yeah, they brought in Sue-Ellen Case a few years back, but that was a no-brainer. Can anyone think of any other exciting senior hires? Even if there are some examples, there is nothing like USC's campus-wide commitment to bringing in these amazing humanists who are all on the forefront of their respective fields. These are people who publish a lot, do the actual teaching of their students, attract top grad students, and are genuinely committed to the social mission of an urban university. Top scientists might bring in a lot of research money, but they rarely contribute to the intellectual life of a university as a whole.*

The thing is, developing a talented faculty in the humanities is really cost effective. Let's be honest, we humanists have low expectations when it comes to institutional support, and we work for cheap. A recent New Yorker article points out that when Duke University wanted to raise its academic stature, they realized that for the price of one middling scientist's salary--not to mention all the labs, support staff, etc--they could hire three or four humanistic scholars at the very top of their field. And for Duke, it totally worked--despite that institution's somewhat checkered history, and location away from the usual centers of academe, it is still has one of the great English Lit doctoral programs in the country, and one of the best university presses. This seems to USC's approach, and assuming that they come through with sustained institutional support--not to be taken for granted!--I bet it will work wonders.

In other news, I highly recommend watching all eight minutes of this cartoon version of the Communist Manifesto, assembled from classic Hollywood cartoons. What could be more LA? Via Billtron via Sushi Pajamas.

* I don't say this lightly; my partner was a chemistry major in college. At a small college, the sciences faculty are often integral to the community, and that's a great thing. At a large research university, however, much scientific research takes place in hospitals and institutes far removed from anything that might be considered "education."

** My god! We won! I could care less, but that was kind of cool!

In Other News

2006-11-30T23:01:00.000-08:00

It is currently the one week of the year when it is cold enough that I have to wear socks at home.

Tuesday Tunes

2006-11-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

It's been pointed out to me that the last five entries in a row on this blog were about animals, more or less. While I am slightly obsessed with my cats, and love giraffes and my parents' new dog very much, I am actually a musicologist, and do spend most of my time thinking about music. So, in what I hope will be a regular Tuesday feature of this blog, I want to take a moment to discuss a favorite song. This week, that song is an obvious choice for those who know me. In fact, when I was teaching History of Rock and Roll this summer, I had an extra credit question on the final exam which read, "What is the greatest song of all time?" This was not a subjective, or defend-in-an-essay question. There was only one right answer, and I had warned my students earlier in the quarter that they needed to write down in their notes that this song was the greatest song of all time, and be ready to regurgitate this answer for the final. So, what is, objectively and empirically,* the greatest song of all time?

The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" (1960

I'm not, of course, the only person to love this song so much. In our classes here, we usually teach this song in conjunction with Susan Douglas's lovely essay "Why the Shirelles Matter." Jacqueline Warwick's forthcoming book on sixties girl groups will no doubt discuss it excellently as well. The basic point that these authors make is that although the usual annoying rockist scholars of popular music studies tend to view the period 1959-1964--after Elvis joins the army, before the Beatles invade--as a fallow time in popular music, it's actually the period when we get unusually rich and complex music aimed at teenage girls. This song is a great example--rather than being sentimental about love and boys and things, it is quite frankly discussing sexuality and teenage romance as a meaningful experience:

Tonight you're mine completely
You give your love so sweetly
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?

Is this a lasting treasure?
Or just a moment's pleasure?
Can I believe the magic of your sigh
Will you still love me tomorrow

Tonight with words unspoken
You said that I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

Compare this with Patti Page's marriage advice for girls, published the same year, and you can see how unusual it is to treat this subject so forthrightly and frankly. And not only is it frank, but it is subtle and emotionally rich--the song's only two and a half minutes, but it feels like this microscopic moment of decision is stretched out for symphonic ages.

But it's not really about the lyrics, of course. And although the songwriters, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, knew how to craft a fancy-pants chord progression very well, it's not even really about that either. I agree with one of Douglas's points that actually it's all about the timbre: the heavy reverb on the lead vocal, mixed all the way front. No saxophone or distorted lead guitar, just those lovely strings, that shimmery quiet guitar, and above all, Shirley Owens's throaty, heartfelt vocals. The violins represent hopefulness, and when they break off for their solo moment, you really believe that it's going to work. But every time Shirley sings, it's heartbreaking. You hear that voice, and you know what is really going to happen in the morning, no matter what she is saying. But then there is the ineffable: it makes me really happy to listen to this song. It's sad, it's heartbreaking, but...the pain feels good, in an endorphin-rush-after-a-tattoo kind of way. I just wish I could put my finger on how the music does this, technically speaking.

It's a sad song, and it's a lovely song, and it is the Greatest Song of All Time. If you haven't listened to it recently, go get a copy, find a quiet place, close your eyes, and enjoy.

*Objective and empirical because I am a musicologist, and I say so.

More Thanksgiving

2006-11-26T19:20:00.000-08:00

Click the owl for more pictures of Thanksgiving at my grandparents. Including, by popular demand, The New Dog. Unfortunately, being rather squirmy, he wasn't very good at sitting still for a picture. Biting my ear, very good at that.

Note to self: those thirty undergraduate analyses of a Chopin prelude ain't going to grade themselves, mister.

Lions and Tigers and Bears

2006-11-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

No dead rats, this time, but lots of giraffes. I've been going to Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house in Napa Valley for almost twenty years now, and each time, there is some sort of activity to keep everyone occupied for the day after. Wineries are the obvious choice, and we've done that a few times. Obviously, this was less fun when I was under 21, but some of the wineries are kind of cool even for kids--one, I seem to recall, has a gondala ride up to the top of the ridge. We've also gone to visit the Calistoga Geyser, the Petrified Forest, even the Napa Valley Wine Train. For the last one, my grandfather had to go incognito in my baseball cap and my mother's sunglasses, since local residents officially disaprove of the train.

This year was no different, and my grandmother bought us all tickets to go to Safari West. It's a 400 acre wildlife preserve that breeds and raises a bunch of endangered African species. I'm not sure where they stand in the hierachy of such parks--they are a private organization that makes money off of tours and visitors staying in authentic South African tent cabins, but they seem to be accredited by all the right people, and eschew fancy lions and elephants in favor of more mundane elk and gazelle whatsits. With the exception of three cheetahs, its all herd animals. But I definitely liked the giraffes. Who doesn't like giraffes? Giraffes are great.

Turkey, Puppies, and Rats

2006-11-21T23:50:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is upon us. Tomorrow, my cousin and I are driving up to my grandparents' house in Napa Valley, where we'll be doing The Meal with my mom's side of the family. I'm looking forward to clean air, good food, meeting The New Dog, and of course, time with the family.

Of course, last year, this same plan ended up with me nose to nose with a dead rat while crawling underneath the house attempting to install a satellite dish. But high hopes for this year!